From Scratch Read online

  Except that I was a girl from Texas who had dreamed of being an actress and had fallen in love with an Italian chef she had met on a street corner. Having a summer wedding on my birthday in an Italian villa that stood next door to the one owned by the Ferragamo family seemed the most logical thing in the world. I was in magic-making mode. When I made up my mind about anything in this state, there was no stopping me.

  “It could be fun. Trust me.”

  * * *

  I found our wedding venue, Villa di Maiano, in the back of a magazine. A palatial fifteenth-century villa with colossal Tuscan columns and sprawling groves of lemon and olive trees in the hills above Florence. It was a thing of Italian Renaissance fairy tales. The main house had in fact been used in a scene from the film A Room with a View. It was owned by a woman whom we called “The Duchess,” the title she inserted when introducing herself. Saro was the first to speak to her by phone. It was for the best. Even with some fluency, I still got nervous speaking Italian on the phone, in the absence of eye contact and gestures. Plus it was expensive to call overseas and I didn’t want to risk running up unnecessary minutes repeating myself for clarity, searching for some elusive verb that refused to leave the tip of my tongue. So it fell on Saro to make the first round of calls and set up our appointment with The Duchess on our upcoming trip to Florence.

  His only resistance to our plan was the very real reality of his slight Sicilian accent. It could thwart all our plans. At the time, the social hierarchy in Italy relegated Sicilians to second-class status when compared to the perceived cultural superiority of their northern countrymen. When dealing with Florentines, Sicilians were looked at as barely a rung above “North Africans,” which was cultural code, a way of dismissing them as both non-Italian and non-European. It was intracultural discrimination on display, something with which Saro and I were familiar. Saro had, in fact, been discriminated against so often trying to find housing when he had arrived in Florence as a university student a decade earlier that he had paid all cash up front for a year just to be able to lay his head on a pillow at night in the city of the David and the Medici. He hated the Florentine bourgeoisie.

  In April, we flew to Florence to finalize our plans, and we met The Duchess, La Duchessa, in person. She suffered the unique, and very European, plight of having the trappings of nobility (name, villa, and perhaps a chest of jewels somewhere) without the cash. She was forty-five, slim, very textbook Florentine in a cashmere twin set and Gucci loafers, auburn dye job, and tanned skin. She looked like she had just come from a weekend getaway on the island of Elba. Her bone structure was strong, chiseled. She resembled the tennis star Martina Navratilova but walked like Sophia Loren.

  At the first sight of the upper garden with its groves of lemon and olive trees and its breathtaking view of Florence’s duomo in the valley below, I was close to tears. Its two-story stone-walled Tapestry Room with wraparound interior balcony made me gasp. Thank goodness we had negotiated the price beforehand, or else she could have taken me to the cleaners.

  Saro, on the other hand, saw it differently. He could talk himself into a stupor about the petit bourgeois class and recount his university days as a strident Leninist. He said his friends would deride his choice for the capitalistic spectacle of it all. That always made me laugh. I reminded him that one of his best men, Antonio number two, drove a Lotus and also had a Maserati. So much for anticapitalistic ideals. Sometimes it struck me that I was marrying some younger, artistic Italian version of my father, who had spent his youthful days as an activist. The contradictions between our points of view had me in stitches, and I was quick to remind Saro that my life’s aspirations were decidedly bourgeois when seen through his eyes. I wanted kids, a second house, if possible, a career in the arts, and great vacations with a view of the sea. I was a suburban black girl from Texas whose parents had picked cotton for their grandparents, who had scratched against systemic oppression to become educated and generous citizens along the dirt roads lining miles of pine thicket. I was now in Italy. This was a moment my ancestors could not have imagined. It was my “look how far we’ve come” moment. I was going to enjoy it.

  However, the second reason Saro drifted off to the periphery of the garden as I talked details with La Duchessa was more subtle and reflective of our internal differences. Saro was fundamentally understated to the exact degree that I liked to stand out. He was comfortable under the radar in direct opposition to my need to be out front, often while I was wearing a sundress and heels. He was the ground to my flight. The contrast suited us well as a couple. But it also made him nervous. No one among his family or friends had ever attempted to pay an aristocrat to throw a party in her house. He had no template for what I was attempting to pull off.

  On that fragrant April day, perched above the valley in which sat one of Europe’s most revered and storied cities, he quietly and politely deferred to me. We would have a wedding in The Duchess’s home. He calmed his nerves by telling himself we were already married. The idea that our marriage was already done allowed him to distance himself from the stark reality that his wedding was happening in Italy and his parents wouldn’t be there.

  * * *

  My boisterous black American clan descended on Florence with a sugar high of excitement, as if they were tasting homemade buttercream icing melting on an oven-warm cake on my grandmother’s back porch back in East Texas. The combination of Italy, food, nuptials, and fashion thrilled them. They were prepared to shop Ferragamo and Gucci with frightening determination. It was the late nineties, after all. The dollar went far against the then Italian lira.

  As I was dressing myself in my wedding gown in a room just off the gran salotto of Villa di Maiano in Fiesole, my sister kept coming back to report on the goings-on in the other side of the villa. Saro and the best men were readying themselves. He had been on edge as our trip to Italy approached and the festivities were coming into focus. Once we got to Florence, his anxiety had really taken flight.

  To make matters worse, he had a persistent and nagging toothache that, just two days prior to the ceremony, had landed him in the hospital. He had an abscessed molar and required immediate emergency oral surgery. As a result, on the morning of our wedding he was on painkillers and sporting a swollen left jaw.

  Light filtered through the six-foot-high windows that looked out onto the garden, and I was full of anticipation and delight that it was all really happening. I could see the chairs that had been set up. A single bouquet of flowers sat on the end of each aisle. There were going to be about fifty guests in total: twenty Italians, all friends from Florence, and thirty or so Americans. My sister alternated between giving me the blow-by-blow of events just outside the room where I was getting ready and taking pictures of me and my mom, who was responsible for helping get me into my dress. All I could think of was how Saro and I were pulling off something magical and unprecedented for both of us. Nothing in either of our personal histories would have lead us to believe that we should or even could be here, in Fiesole, among breathtaking stone and marble. Yet there we were, in a living film set, about to get married.

  That it was also my twenty-fifth birthday made the day somehow more transcendent. My sister had gone to great pains to get me a white gardenia to wear above my left ear, à la Billie Holiday. It was a nod to the voice that had kept me company as a new exchange student cleaning toilets in the bar where I would first get to know the man I was about to marry. My grandmother had gifted me delicate antique rhinestone shoe clips, a throwback to her time in East Texas attending education and holiday banquets. She had used them for years as a way to dress up her regular shoes and make them seem “new and sparkly” for a special occasion. She had never had money for luxury. Wearing her shoe clips as “something borrowed” was the most special part of everything I wore that day. And I had my sapphire blue engagement ring (something blue) and my discounted dress by an Ethiopian designer, Amsale Aberra, that I had found for a third of the price when a swanky Beverly Hill
s department store was going out of business (something new).

  My dad appeared in the anteroom of the villa’s dressing room. He stood beaming in an earth-tone linen suit and cowboy boots. Dad had only two kinds of shoes: cowboy boots and running shoes.

  “You ready to do this? Ain’t no time like the present to start your life,” he said. My father was full of self-coined truisms, folksy East Texas speak that he was constantly refining. “I’m ready to walk my daughter down the aisle in Italy, twenty-five years to the day that I first laid eyes on you, girl.” He offered me a big smile that radiated love and pride.

  “Dad, please. You gonna talk the whole time we walk down the aisle?”

  “I might.”

  “Okay, then, let’s get started.” I took him by the arm and held on tight. In pictures from that moment, my eye still travels to the center of the frame, where the folds of linen in the crook of his arm tell the tale of my nerves. I am practically squeezing with all my might.

  Aubrey sang the soul classic “Flesh of My Flesh,” a capella as I walked down the aisle.

  After we said “I do” and kissed, we turned to jump the broom, an African American wedding ritual dating back to slavery. Jumping in unison signals the leap into matrimony. I hoisted my dress with one hand and held Saro’s hand with the other. When we landed, I noticed four faces on my walk back down the aisle that I had not seen earlier. It took a second for it all to register. The woman had a face that was almost a replica of Saro’s mother’s face. There was a man seated next to her. I glanced at Saro and saw a tender look of recognition on his face. They were his aunt Rosa, his mother’s sister, and her husband, Uncle Peppe. They had come from Switzerland with their two kids. I grabbed Saro’s hand even tighter.

  Unbeknown to us, they had driven down using the address on the invitation I had sent them. They had told no one they were coming, not Saro’s mother, not Saro’s father. To do so would have been a family betrayal. Still, there they were. Saro was speechless, moved to tears by their gesture. And for the first time, I sensed what we had missed in not having his parents there. My heart opened wide.

  After a round of pictures was taken, including a group photo in the center of the garden with our small eclectic tribe of family and friends, the aging yet stunning villa our backdrop, we went inside to have a five-course dinner among centuries-old tapestries.

  Canopied under the moonlight of a summer Tuscan sky, my family had one hell of a good time. They danced the Harlem Shuffle on the garden terrace and cast laughter out into the valley of Florence’s mesmerizing night lights. Back at the hotel, telegrams from Sicily waited for us from various relatives to whom I had sent invitations. Instead of dancing the night away with his sister, uncles, aunts, and cousins, we had received messages on telefax paper that said: “Rammaricati per non poter essere presenti alla ceremonia. Vi auguriamo una serena e lunga vita matrimoniale.—We regret we can’t be present at the ceremony. We wish you a serene and long married life.” There was nothing from his parents.

  I read those telegrams privately the next morning, feeling freshly wronged and quietly angry. His family had forsaken him. In the afterglow of the magic of the night before, I felt so many mixed emotions. It was all achingly bittersweet. I began to wonder if I would ever meet the people who had missed one of the most important moments in their son’s life because of me—and if I could ever forgive them for breaking not my heart but Saro’s.

  I put the telegrams on top of the hotel dresser in plain view, in case Saro wanted to read them later, alone. Then I looked out the window of our hotel room onto the Ponte Vecchio and the Arno River flowing gently beneath its arches. I wrestled with the truth of the moment: in creating one family, Saro had lost another.

  Part Two

  FIRST SUMMER

  Nun si po’ aviri la carni senz’ ossu.

  You can’t have meat without the bone.

  —Sicilian proverb

  ISLAND OF STONE

  “Allacciarsi la cintura di sicurezza.” At first I didn’t understand the flight attendant’s words over the loudspeaker. They were disparate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle I couldn’t quite put together. Then a flight attendant in the aisle next to me said it in English: “Fasten your seat belt,” pointing to my seat belt. As we prepared to land in Sicily, everything needed translation, even a language I had spoken for twenty years.

  From the airplane window, I was confronted with two contrasting visions: a lush, sapphire blue sea below me and a mountain of barren stone straight ahead. Water and stone. Fluidity and impenetrability. Nothing in between but me, being flown through the air, descending into a piece of stone confetti in the middle of the Mediterranean, the island of Saro’s incarnation.

  All I could think about was his ashes in a duffel bag in the overhead bin and how I had promised his mom, a week after his death, that I would bring his ashes to her. But now I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. How the hell am I going to get through the next month? It wasn’t enough to be a widow in my own home, in my own language, sleeping each night in the bed I had shared with Saro. Instead, I had taken my grief on the road because I had promised to do so. I was hurling myself through space in the general direction of a mountain of more unknowns, more tenuousness, more feelings that had no end. Grief, Sicilian style. I was taking up residence for the next month in a home where il lutto—mourning—hung on the front door like a shroud.

  Suddenly my decision seemed like a bad choice. How was I going to keep it together in a place where everything, including the arc of the sun, was different? There was no part of me that could have chosen to leave well enough alone. I could not have chosen the easier way, the way that didn’t lead to concentric circles of grief. I feared I was asking so much of myself, testing my mettle too soon. Saro had been dead just four months.

  Zoela was deep in sleep on my lap, her favorite stuffed panda under her arm. Her eyelids fluttered as I caressed her hair. We had crossed nine time zones, and she had closed her eyes for only this last leg of the trip.

  In a matter of minutes, we would deplane and travel an hour and a half’s drive east—past the mountain of stone that lay ahead—to a woman, a mother, and a town waiting for my return. His return. Saro was coming back to rest alongside his father, Giuseppe—the man who had once rejected his own son because of me. I was returning with Saro’s daughter, the only person left carrying his name.

  The plane touched ground with three gentle bumps, and I held Zoela closer, careful not to wake her just yet. She was the little girl with eyes like chestnuts and a face Saro adored. She was the one who had brought us all even deeper reconciliation and love. She was the reason Saro had been willing to struggle each year, against what was medically convenient, to return to Sicily. Being with his daughter in his homeland healed his heart as much as, if not more than, the chemotherapy healed his body. Seeing his daughter sitting at his mother’s table brought color back to his face; laughter spilled from him effortlessly. He had carved out timeless experiences in the face of the little time that was left him. He had given her memories of him dancing with her at the edge of the Mediterranean. Part of me hoped like hell I could keep giving her Sicilian summers, beautiful memories of time with his family. But I questioned the physical and emotional toll it might take at a time when I was still trying to find my bearings and help her find hers.

  I was acutely aware that I was traveling with a seven-year-old child who still grieved so hard that her body shook at night until she fell asleep. A child who pushed dinner away because she wanted to wait for her dad. A child who refused even to speak to her Italian grandmother on the phone because the sound of her voice reminded her of her dad. My choice to come here meant that I’d have to parent her and her mercurial grief almost seven thousand miles away from home. My grief and love demanded all the strength I had and then asked for more.

  My parents had questioned the wisdom of my going to Italy, especially alone with Zoela. I knew we had to do this, just the two of us. Despite my father
and stepmother’s offer to come with us, I knew we had to do this without the distraction and pressure of my family trying to take care of me. Without my trying to translate among Sicilian, Italian, and English. And I didn’t want to have to take care of them in a foreign place. They’d never been there, and this trip was not the time for that kind of first. Plus I didn’t want my mother-in-law having the burden of additional guests. Nonna and I needed alone time to grieve together and get to know each other. We had to begin at an ending and make a new beginning.

  Still, my parents worried. In the four months since Saro had died, I was still raw with grief. My dad, ever the lawyer and a practitioner of Texas-sized common sense, cross-examined me with basic questions: Can you change your ticket if you want to come home early? My stepmother took a different tactic: What can you take to bring you comfort? Be sure you just rest. Don’t do anything you don’t feel like doing. My mother offered to create a care package for Saro’s mom. Underneath it all, I wondered if my family of origin also held the tiniest traces of resentment about the way the Sicilians had once rejected their daughter.

  Everyone could see the physical toll grief had taken on me. Along with his spirit and the comfort of Saro’s body, gone were his pastas and soups. I had dropped fifteen pounds while Saro was hospitalized. Those closest to me reminded me to hydrate, eat, sleep. I assured them I was fine, but the truth was that I needed Ativan to get through the car pool lane at Zoela’s school.