Nomfiction, part 1: Arancini by Deb Fleischman
IN Italy, La Madonna is everywhere—rendered in frescos, enshrined in basilicas, honored in local festivals, invoked in the prayers of old widows and the curses of old men. Even so, a traveler, taken in by the cobblestone piazzas, the art, the hillsides teeming with olive orchards and vineyards, the lyrical language, local wines and regional dishes, might find it easy to forget that this country is Catholic.
It is Christmastime when you and your future husband, Nick, take an overnight train from Umbria in central Italy to Sicily to visit his eighty-two-year-old great-uncle Jo. Jo greets you at the train with a bag of arancini, a Sicilian specialty—deep fried, conical rice croquettes stuffed with ground meat, tomato sauce, peas, and mozzarella. They are strange looking but delicious temptations you come to love.
You spend two weeks calling Jo Zio, because he is everyone’s uncle, the oldest living member of his family on both sides. Three times a day Jo brews shots of espresso, which you sip from tiny porcelain cups in his cramped kitchen, the only room he feels comfortable in. The cucina is spare save for an old army cot where he sleeps and the two iconic features of the twenty-first century Italian kitchen—a painting of La Madonna, and a TV blaring game shows with half naked go-go dancers. They keep Jo company in his old age, but now he has visitors to entertain.
“Sit down,” he gestures, setting out warm homemade ricotta for breakfast—from his friend who makes it fresh, he tells you, “from the cow.” Then he lights his pipe and fills the room with Baralo-scented Forte tobacco and stories of his youth—the time the whole town came out to corral Glauco’s escaped pigs, which were running wild through the Centro; his high school field trip up Mt. Etna on Christmas day where he ventured onto steaming pebbles of cooling lava and burned a hole in the sole of his only pair of shoes; Sundays, after church, when he and his pals paraded down Piazza del Duomo, dressed in their finest, strutting for the girls.
Soon, you begin to get comfortable. You imagine yourself related to this droll old man, dapperly outfitted in a wool jacket, button-down vest, and the traditional Sicilian coppola worn by men young and old. You spend hours each day eating, gathered with his huge extended family, enticed by Sicilian dishes—sfincione, caponate, carne by the truckload (one of Nick’s second cousins owns a macelleria), and an assortment of dolce followed by caffè while you listen to Zio rattle off jokes with the kind of deadpan delivery stand-up comics kill for.
At the cemetery, where you visit his wife’s grave, he gives you the low-down on the dead.
“You see that grave over there?” He points to a half dozen spectacular sprays of flowers hovering over a freshly dug grave.
“That one wasa killed by the Mafia.” He calls your attention to another lavish arrangement of white lilies in the shape of a giant cross.
“Blown up. By the Mafia.”
Then he turns somber, motions to a marble mausoleum in pristine condition that looks like Michelangelo might have carved it. Jo curses under his breath, and speaks of the Cosa Nostra, which has terrorized his town since he was a boy. He empties out the violets and stale water from the vase that sits in a stand by his wife’s grave. Jo is faithful to Lina and brings a fresh bouquet to her site every week but he is bereft without her, and sometimes when he is not nurturing his astounding collection of cacti—hundreds of species that cover his flat rooftop and keep him busy—he wishes for his own death.
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