by Tembi Locke
“Did you side with Calogero?” She poured a thimbleful of espresso for herself, a full demitasse for me. “Because others come and go, but we are here together.”
It took me a moment to register the full spectrum of what was being said—both a statement and an invitation, a moment as quintessentially Sicilian as the earth on which we stood. Nonna saw this as us versus them. At the same time, she was testing my allegiance and sense of belonging to this place, this community. Behind it all, she was asking if I was a part of her us.
The answer had been unequivocal for me.
“Yes, I did,” I assured her. “You won’t have any problems. Calogero will probably bring you lentils and garbanzo beans all year.”
She laughed and wiped down the sink and countertop, wiping away dust or problems no one could see but her. I hoped she was also wiping away any doubt about how I felt about her and the place she called home. Soon afterward she dressed in her formal widow blacks, sprayed her hair in case the wind picked up, and left for Mass.
While Nonna was at church, I peeled Zoela away from her iPad and told her a boiling cauldron was waiting for us. It was time to make the sauce. We closed the front door and followed the scent of burning wood and velvety plum tomatoes.
When we stepped into the cellar, we found all the members of the Lupo family in full swing. One duo supervised the washing, another duo added onion and coarse sea salt from the flats of Trapani. There was a milling station where boiled tomatoes were put through metal sieves to separate the pulp from the seeds and skin. It was there that the tomatoes were reduced to a puree. The smell of smoke that permeated the town was almost ethereal up close. In a second room, the oldest member of the Lupo family, Pina, stirred a second cauldron exclusively for the puree. She used a wooden spoon the length of her body, toe to breast. Her job was to constantly stir the sauce in a gentle motion so as not to let it stick to the bottom. Nearby, the oldest men scooped out small pots of the sauce and took them to the bottling station. Then Maria Pia filled each bottle, capping it with a bottle cap. Lastly, there was an area of the cellar where hundred-year-old straw cesti, large baskets, rested on the floor. They were the kind once carried by mules. Full bottles were put into the baskets and wrapped in blankets to cool.
Zoela and I looked at the ancient, efficient, precisely timed and rhythmic operation with no idea where to jump in. For a moment, I accepted that our role might be to stand and watch at the periphery, outsiders looking in. I worried that all my buildup to Zoela about making the sauce had been a letdown. I knew she would be bored in about five minutes if all she could do was stand around a hot cellar and watch other people work. But then she spoke.
“Posso aiutare?—Can I help?” The room lit up in surprise and enthusiasm for the little voice asking to join in.
“Certo—Of course” was the response that came back in unison. “Get her an apron,” someone urged.
“Voglio mescolare—I want to stir.” Zoela was pointing to the first cauldron over a bright orange-and-red wood flame. The wooden spoon was taller than she was. “I can do that.”
“You must stand back. Or the smoke, onion, and steam will hurt your face. You have to stand back and stir.”
Zoela took the spoon with a kind of glee that seemed unique to the moment when a child is invited by adults to participate for the first time in something previously unknown to her. She looked to me for approval. Despite the obvious risk of fire, smoke, and scalding liquids, there was no way I would have denied her the moment.
I hung back as everyone worked in silent ritual. Zoela’s nine-year-old hands were doing something her grandmother had done, her father had likely done. It was collaborative, practical, healing in the sense of the continuity it provided. This went on for a while, and then Marianna broke the silence.
“Tutte le cose in questa salsa vengono da qui—Everything in this sauce comes from here.” She put an emphasis on here and then pointed to the open window just beyond the cauldron, to the fields in the distance framed in a picture window of stone. “Tutto viene da questo terrano—Everything comes from this land.”
Zoela looked up and out. I followed her gaze. The valley was visible, the mountain range some twenty miles in the distance. The hills were streaked in crimson, the color of summer tomato harvest.
“It is our little piece of earth,” Maria Pia continued, moving closer to Zoela. She stood behind Zoela and put her hand on top of Zoela’s to help her stir. The work was hard and fatiguing. I had been ready to help, but Marianna had sensed it, too. Zoela was relieved for the assistance but not at all ready to relinquish her post.
She stood stoic, her nine-year-old body as determined and committed as that of any other person in the room to making the sauce. My heart swelled. I admired this soul. She was the kind of child I imagined might become a woman who was not afraid to face life’s heat and fire and still stir the pot. Who could appreciate the earth on which we stood. Who knew that she, wherever she might go, was a part of our shared terra. It was embedded into the meaning of her name, Zoela—a piece of earth.
We stayed another hour. I bottled, I stirred, I salted tomatoes, I learned to open the heart of the fruit the ancient way, plunging my thumb into the center where the stem once stood, getting access to the core. Zoela and I left smelling of smoky eucalyptus wood, basil, onion, and sea salt. It was in our hair, in our clothes, it had seeped into our skin. I was reminded of the way Saro had smelled when he had returned to that tiny apartment in Florence each night after working at Acqua al 2. It was a beguiling, living smell that I didn’t want to leave me.
I went to bed that night tired but with the vision of plum tomatoes dancing in my head. The child, the daughter of the chef, stirring the pot. How I wished that Saro had been there to see it. Yet somehow I felt he had. I felt it the same way I had felt that he would be waiting for me the morning we said good-bye.
SAGE AND SAINTS
I woke on my forty-fourth birthday thinking of fennel and Saro’s poetry. It was the last morning I would have alone with Nonna that summer, before my parents arrived by lunchtime. A few days later, Zoela and I would head to Rome, then back to Los Angeles. I heard the unmistakable sound of the water tank being filled above the rafters in the bedroom. Water arrived in town once a week from the mountains, and residents were allowed to fill their household tanks for the week ahead. The flow of water echoed through the stone walls and bounced off the marble floors. It was loud, thunderous enough to wake me. Zoela was still asleep.
The smell of household cleanser rose from downstairs. I heard Nonna moving chairs. It was likely that she was vigorously mopping the floors. Cleaning was her meditation, her tradition on our final days. My parents would be arriving in a few hours, and we would surely have a steady stream of visitors. Her cleaning time might be my final chance to talk with her quietly, just the two of us, face-to-face.
I readied myself, tying back my hair and slipping on a pajama cover. We would likely be interrupted by some passersby—the residents of Via Gramsci on their way to get bread, bringing fresh vegetables from the fields, hanging laundry out to dry, vendors selling their goods. They would poke their heads into the kitchen door with local news or gossip or to share whatever ailed them. So I wanted to be presentable, but I wasn’t ready to dress fully. And after three summers, Nonna knew that when I sat at her table in my pajamas I was in no rush.
When I hit the final step of the landing that led into the modest living room, I was careful not to slip on her wet floor.
“Stai attenta!—Be careful!” she said. “I heard you above. The coffee is already on. Sit down.”
I did as I was told. She checked the flame under the caffettiera, handed me my usual demitasse cup, and passed the sugar right behind it. It was a smooth, effortless action, simple kitchen table choreography we had done countless times before. I settled in.
“Mamma.” I ventured to call her that, it felt natural in the moment. “You know how I feel about good-byes.” I suppose I felt embo
ldened by the first light of day, my thoughts of Saro, my birthday, the impending guests, and the unspoken awareness that another summer was not promised to us.
“You don’t have to tell me, since yesterday my heart is heavy. And for the next few days I won’t be well,” she said, lowering the flame on the stove-top espresso maker. She took a seat.
She went on to ask me about my plans for the day. I told her I’d be going to the cemetery one last time. She reminded me to weigh my luggage and to travel only with what was necessary. She told me we still had six bottles of tomato sauce to wrap and put into the suitcase. We continued with that small talk for about ten minutes.
Then we sat just silently. The bubbling sound of espresso perking to the top of the caffettiera broke the silence. She poured us both a thimbleful to start. Then she spoke. “What you have passed, the years you stood at Saro’s side, you deserve to be rewarded for that.”
She was speaking with rare, unbidden intimacy about my life away from her home, away from our moments at her table. I downed my coffee and looked out the door. It took a minute before I realized the various things she might be suggesting. Then, without a second more, I walked through the opening she had made in our conversation.
“In my own way, I am trying to pull myself forward. Raising Zoela to the best of my ability. I’m trying to build a new life,” I said, feeling suddenly exposed, like a melon split open. “I hope for a life that is expansive for both of us. Zoela and I need that. With any luck, I have some forty years ahead of me. I’d like them to be filled with joy as well.”
She shrugged her shoulders, “Ma come no?—Why not?” She went to take another swig of coffee, but her cup was empty, so she looked out past the hand-sewn lace curtain that hung at the front door. She wiped her mouth with a napkin and continued, “Going forward no one forgets.” Then she turned and looked at me. “I don’t know if I’m making myself clear.”
I held her glance. I wondered if she was talking about my opening my life to another love.
“Yes, I think I understand. My heart will never forget while I carry this life forward.”
She nodded in response. The air about us was full of what wasn’t being said. She was, in her own way, telling me I was known and loved. That wherever my life might take me, there was a love that was unshakable.
She pushed back her glasses and used the same napkin to wipe her eyes. Then she pushed a pastry of apricot and brioche in my direction.
I knew we had passed another milestone as friends, widows, mothers.
“Now let’s call my cousin in Petralia. That one will sink her teeth into me with a strong bite of guilt if you don’t say good-bye to her personally. Hand me the phone.”
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, I was dressed and out the door. I left Zoela, still asleep, to walk the hills one last time. I decided to go to a place I had once visited with Saro and his father. I walked down Via Gramsci and hooked a left. Sheep bells clanged behind me as the herder brought his flock down the main street to graze in the valley below town.
I felt a wind off the sea and looked toward the outward-stretched sky. In that moment, I couldn’t think of a better birthday present. I didn’t see sky like that in L.A. There the sky felt as though it was a dome over the city. And most days, I moved hurriedly along urban stretches without ever having cause to look up or out.
At the far end of a narrowing hillside was our family mulberry tree. Surrounding it were four pear trees that produced miniature, densely flavored green pears. It was where I would go to get away.
Silence was guaranteed.
The mulberries didn’t disappoint. It was late in the season. Many had been taken by birds and fallen to the ground. I could never reach the high fruit without a ladder. So I settled for the berries left on the low branches. Everything about my life with Saro came rushing back to me. I remembered artichokes in spring and salt under his fingernails. I basked in that tiny detail. All the while, I let the tart, sweet fruit burst in my mouth once again.
Then I walked back toward town. I detoured and passed the road that led to the oil mill. A day earlier, I had sat with Saro’s distant cousin Epifanio. He ran the olive mill located just outside of town, and he had given me an impromptu lesson in degustazione dell’olio di oliva—olive oil tasting. He had said that the key to tasting oil is to let the palate awaken to it, wrestling with its peppery, grassy flavors while also recognizing its smooth quality.
Around the mill, Epifanio had been cultivating heirloom varieties of mint, sage, and basil, ancient varieties that were common centuries ago but that were little known by modern Sicilians. All of it, he instructed me, was due to nature’s organic cross-pollination; man need not interfere.
The thing that I focused in on was salvia all’ ananas—pineapple sage, distinguished from the classic variety by its variegated color. In more than forty years on the planet, I hadn’t known such a thing existed. The island, still twenty years later, was showing herself to me. When I rubbed the sage between my palms, it emitted a delicate scent reminiscent of pineapple. Epifanio told me I couldn’t buy seeds. That it grew from clippings, letting a piece of one plant give birth to another.
I had stood there enjoying the aroma of pineapple jump from my palm, realizing that life was still revealing itself to me, I just had to stay open to it.
I meandered back home, passing clusters and clusters of wild fennel. I hadn’t seen it before, but there it was, growing enthusiastically along the side of the same road I had passed earlier, accessorizing the landscape, the white stalks knee and waist high, rising with bushy green tops that looked to the casual eye like weeds. Fennel is a delicious thing that can sprout up among weeds along the road of life. As Saro had said, “It’s there to make you know that you are alive.”
When I got home, Zoela was awake and seated at Nonna’s table.
“Ciao, mammina—Hello, little mama,” she said with a grin.
Each summer in Sicily had marked her growth. Walking the streets on her own each morning to get the daily bread from the pasticceria, learning the ancient craft of making fresh ricotta cheese, frolicking in the family’s orchard, Sicily had become a gift to her, the place where she would always know her father. Her independence was breathtaking, her friendships deeper, her Italian charming. She now made jokes in Italian, making me believe that Italian Zoela was American Zoela’s alter ego. I rather loved them both.
She was writing a postcard. It was something I made her do every summer, write a postcard to herself telling herself what the summer had meant to her. Then we would send it back to L.A. This postcard had a nightscape of Cefalù. I thought about how we had walked the streets until well after midnight a week earlier. We had let the sea air fill our lungs, we had slurped granita in the cathedral square. She had found il Gran Carro, the Big Dipper, in the sky and had talked about her dad.
“Do you think he can see us here?” she asked.
She knew the close of our trip was drawing near. So we talked about saying good-bye to Nonna, her cousins, and her friends. Her grief sat right at the surface. I could see how she pushed for and pulled from the conversation. She talked about Saro’s hair the day he had died, she asked about Nonna’s age. Then later, as we were falling to sleep that night, she made me promise to do my best “to live to be a hundred years old.”
I told her what I always did when fear and loss left her quiet and pensive: “I’m healthy. If I can help it, I’ll be here long enough to see you become an old lady.” It made her smile.
“But I won’t live at home then, you know,” she was quick to point out.
“I’d be surprised if you did,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll live here.”
“If you do, make sure I have a room to visit.”
After she finished her postcard and cleared away breakfast, she started to help Nonna prepare lunch. This was a first. Zoela called to me in the next room, where I was wrapping bottles of tomato sauce in newspaper and slipping them into old
socks Saro had left there years before. “Guarda, Mamma—Watch me, Mom.” She was grating cheese with a vertical tabletop grater that had a crank as large as her hand. It was the oldest kitchen tool in the house, purchased not long after Nonna’s wedding.
A quick survey of the kitchen, and I could see that Nonna was preparing three courses—spaghetti with a classic tomato sauce, eggplant parmigiana, sausage from the butcher, plates of cheeses, and a leafy green salad, dusted with sea salt and tossed with her hands. She would add the vinegar once my parents arrived. Dessert would be fresh melon from her cousin Stefano’s land.
Food was the center of her family life. Cooking was her second nature. There were no formal recipes; the ingredients, quantities, and steps were all in her head. I had asked her once to write down a recipe, and it had been like asking her to write down how she breathed or walked. “Non ti posso dire. Faccio come si deve fare.—I can’t tell you. I just do it as it should be done.”
The food from Nonna’s kitchen told a story, an epic and personal story of an island and a family. It told the story of poverty, grief, love, and joy. It spoke forthrightly of people who had, at times, survived on bread, cheese, and olives while foraging wild vegetables from the rich orchards dotting the foothills near her house. Her kitchen always told me what was in season. It reminded me of my proximity to North Africa, to the East. It told me of the people whose cultures had passed through the island and the ways they had left traces of themselves. But what I loved most was that her kitchen showed me how one ingredient can be made into many different dishes. Her food spoke of malleability and resourcefulness in loss, in love, and in life. She had learned how to turn subsistence living into abundance.