In Sicily, With My Parents:
Beato Felice

by Rosemary A. Gaynor

We think it is October 28; that's the date we put in the guest book at the Norman castle this morning. It is Saturday, though. We know this for sure, because tomorrow the cardinal comes to town, and the cardinal only comes on Sundays.

I don't actually care about the date, I'm just along for the ride. As my mother, my father, my sister, and my brother-in-law Lui rework our itinerary for the third time that day, I look out the car window. After twenty-one years of living in the States, I am back in Italy again with my parents. I don't care where we go or what we see. It is enough to be here with them.

Enna? Caltanisetta? Nicosia? They agree on Nicosia. My mother, sitting between my sister and me in the back, runs her sharp nails over my knee—not quite a scratch, more of a caress—and makes a pronouncement: It doesn't really matter what we see. It isn't what you see, it's who you meet. My sister agrees. Lui says nothing, intent upon the sudden curves into the valley, but my father takes up the theme, elaborates it, and starts itemizing our acquaintances thus far. This listing is part of his engineering background, I think. My mother nudges me. She loves my father, but after forty-seven years she permits herself frequent nudges and not-so-subtle changes of topic. My father loves her too, but differently. I have never once seen him roll his eyes. My mother nudges me again. Suddenly I care about the date; I care a great deal. If it is October 28th, we only have six more days together, and that is not enough. Not nearly enough.

My father pauses in his list of people we've met so far. "And don't forget Salvo," I add. We laugh. For four days, we've been laughing. "Ma signora, sono io Salvo!" my sister howls. It's from the hotel in Palermo. My mother wanted to switch rooms. The market, she tells the desk clerk. It starts at two in the morning and she has to have the windows open to sleep. For four hours she didn't sleep. She wants a room on the opposite side of the hotel tonight. But no, there are no rooms on that side available. My mother, leans on the counter and taps her key. No, no, she says. Get Salvo for me. Salvo will fix this for me. Ma signora, the clerk says, sono io Salvo! No, no, my mother says. She is not distracted by this. The other Salvo! At lunch, ten minutes later, the maître d 's tag proudly announces that he, too, is Salvo. And that night, the waiter at Minchiapetito (I have big hunger) tells us he is going to New York for his honeymoon. We tell him where to eat and what to see and where to kiss. His name, we find out, is also Salvo.

Lui pulls up at a sign post. "A destra," my sister says. "Are you sure?" asks my dad. We see that there are two signs for Nicosia; one points to the right and the other points to the left. My mother says, no, go left. And Lui, in spite of the line behind him, waits patiently for them to agree. Lui may have buttons to push, but he didn't bring any of them along on this trip. He certainly brought everything else, though. His suitcase takes up three quarters of the trunk. My parents and I laugh at this. We're smug, too. I'm especially smug; I've crammed two weeks of clothing into a bag just slightly bigger than Lui's camera case.

They decide, at last: "Vai a sinistra, Lui!" I can't figure out why they keep giving the poor guy instructions in Italian; he doesn't know any Italian. And testing him at noon, when there are hungry Italian drivers honking their horns behind us, isn't really fair. Actually, he does know one word in Italian: lui. His real name is Steve, but in the restaurants and the hotels, where he cannot speak for himself, everyone refers to him as "lui." And for lui? Does lui prefer veal or fish? Does lui wish for dessert? We call him Lui now too.

We end up going to Nicosia twice, maybe because there are two signs. The first time there we eat lunch. I parrot my father's order; he is never wrong in a restaurant. This time it's bucatini alla boscaiola. My mother likes her ragu, very fresh, but she is distracted, working on tonight's hotel. The waiter and the owner and the cook and the cook's friend are called upon for advice. By dessert, the five of them have decided on La Vigneta. The owner calls ahead for us; it is his friend's hotel. We must go—at once, he says; the rooms cannot be held. And so, with the appropriate dramatic leave-taking, we go. At the hotel, we lug Lui's huge suitcase up the stairs, drop off our smaller bags, and clean up. Five minutes, my father had said. We were to rendezvous in five minutes. But he can't get the key out of his door. We stand around him, watching him fiddle with the key. It won't budge. My mother mentions that he is an engineer. She forgets to add that this summer, at seventy-nine, he completely remodeled the staircase at home for her. His hands are still scarred over from the drywall and metal braces he had to tear down. I suggest we leave the key in the lock. Safer with the key stuck in the door, I say; hadn't they noticed? Every door has the same lock—one key fits all. This strikes us as funny. Locks seem suddenly illogical.

We get back to Nicosia around four o'clock; we're here to see the big cathedral.

My father and I are in San Salvatore (another Salvo!), not the big cathedral, just a while-we're-waiting little church. I am carrying his camera bag, partly to help him out and partly to feel like a little girl again. I spent the better part of every childhood vacation lugging his camera bag, trudging behind him through Italian towns, trying to see things the way he saw them. My mother appears suddenly behind us. "I just met a policewoman," she says. And it is not a non-sequitor for my mother when she adds, "We're going to see the Baron's house."

She takes us outside to meet the policewoman, Lina, signora vigilante. She is in uniform, but it is Saturday evening, so her face is dressed for a party. Her main function at this hour is to adjudicate the parking spaces in the busy piazza. She does this with energy. If we had met her first, she says, we could have parked in the square. My father waits for Lui and my sister, who have been parking the car for more than a half-hour, while my mother and I go to the baron's house. It is an old folks home now. I hate seeing my vibrant mother there. But my mother thinks it is cheerful. Lina guides us, like heads of state, through the crowded foyer and up the stairs to the echoing ballroom, where we can see the picture of the baron. We are impressed. We have no clue who the Baron is, but it is clear that we must be impressed. My mother notices the beautiful plaster molding on the ceiling. Lina likes this: as a treat, she shows us the chapel.

Ten minutes later, my parents and I are still in the piazza outside the Baron's house, waiting for Lui and my sister. Lina bustles over to us. She will take us to the house of Beattu Felice, she says. The statue on the other side of town? I ask. She is delighted. We know about Beattu Felice? She steps in closer. We are no longer foreigners. He is to be a saint, she says. She will show us.

We rush, she fusses, and on a little side street three minutes later, some woman has to leave her Saturday life to let us into Beattu Felice's tiny house. We do not want to impose, but Lina insists. The sign says Beato, but they say Beattu. Here is the where the parents of Beattu Felice slept. The small closet there? That is the oven to bake the bread that Beattu Felice ate. I creep inside the closet and take a picture of the minuscule curved oven. I take two. The pictures won't come out, but it makes me happy. It makes the women happy too. And then we go to the back of the house, where Beattu Felice slept. It is a lovely stables, my mother says, and she means it. She is always sincere, and she really does like stables. She grew up on a farm; anything farmy elicits her appreciation. Somehow, she remembers reading that Beattu slept here with the donkeys. She repeats this to Lina, but falters on the word donkey. My sister, whose first husband was Italian, supplies the word asino without missing a beat. Lina is delighted that my mother knows about Beattu's sleeping arrangement and that my sister knows how to say ass in Italian. L'asino. We pass the word around like communion; we hold it in our mouths; we nod with pleasure.

Before we leave, the caretaker gives us little pictures of Beattu Felice. We are expected to take extras for friends. We do; three lapsed Catholics, one Jew, and one atheist—we load up on these pictures of Beattu Felice as though they are free Lotto tickets.

As we walk back to the main piazza, my mother asks Lina about the cathedral we want to see. The cathedral can't be seen until tomorrow, Lina tells us. The cardinal comes tomorrow. There will be a grand ceremony. And then, for some reason we miss, she invites us to her home to use her toilet.

Ten minutes later, Lina finds us at the gelateria in the piazza and says that she has special maps for us. My father's knee is hurting more than he'll say, and my mother's back has gone out again; I am sent. I have to run to keep up with her. The side street is curiously empty. It is dark inside the police station, too, and the light switch doesn't work. It occurs to me that I could be a stupid, unsuspecting tourist walking into an obvious trap. But Lina switches on the desk lamp and digs out the special maps. These are identical to the two maps we have in the car already, but she is adamant and I place them carefully under my Beattu Felice cards, feeling a little foolish. As we leave the station, she points out the bathroom.

We have come to Nicosia for the cathedral. We have come to Nicosia for the cathedral twice, but we haven't seen it yet. In the morning, perhaps, my mother says. We will return. We agree. It is a nice thought. There is the pomp of the cardinal's ceremony. There is Lina's family to meet. Her bathroom to use, I add. What's with the bathroom? It's wistful speaking; we know that in the morning we will head in the opposite direction. If we return to Nicosia, we will never leave.

In the car, we laugh about Beattu Felice all the way back to the hotel. It is not funny really, but we love to say his name. Beattu, blessed. Felice, happy. Beattu Felice. Blessed Happy. Blessed Happy. We picture Lina bustling, officious, so determined to distribute pleasurable moments, and we laugh because this is who we are in the States—we are Lina, and nobody understands our strange ebullience.

At the hotel we laugh, too. The waiter will not allow that we are too full for appetizers. He will see that we get what is necessary. And so, even before the primo piatto, we have focaccia, two kinds of bruschetta, a plate of pickled mysteries, and a saucer of strange meats. The waiter insists on another bottle of wine. He forbids Lui to put cheese on his risotto alla marinara. My sister tries to tell him he is bossy, but she cannot find the right word in Italian. Opinionated, he suggests. Determined? He returns with my mother's ragu. Bossy, my sister says. How do you say it in Italian? I know this word, he says: Knowledgeable!

The next morning, the restaurant reception is more gruff. It is the nonna, and she is washing cups at seven a.m. I ask what time my parents can come down for breakfast. She shrugs, and I go outside to wait for her to warm up. Down the road I see a woman washing out a chicken coop. A few steps later, I see an escaped chicken. I know nothing about chickens' peripatetic philosophies. I think it is a crisis. I run back to the gate to let the woman know she has lost a chicken. She laughs at me; of course the chicken will come back. See? She clucks, and the chicken sneaks back in under the wire fence. The woman invites me in, but it is too early to impose and I am afraid of farmyard waste. I suddenly wish I were my mother. My mother would have gone in. They would have talked, learned, laughed.

In the other direction I meet three shepherds, two dogs, and a lot of sheep. Five sheep wander off, and the dogs stay put, cooly watching them leave. Cursing, the two old men jump into their Fiat and chase after the sheep. I take a picture. And then I take pictures of the dogs because I love dogs. Shall I send you a copy, I ask? No, says the youngest shepherd. I think he is slow. We are alone with the sheep and the dogs and have walked for five minutes together in companionable silence. When he says no, he doesn't look at me, but looks, instead, around him, bewildered. I am certain he is slow. And then he says, Who needs pictures? The only people who have pictures taken are dead people. I tuck my camera away, wondering who is slow after all.

Later, at a more reasonable breakfast time, when we are sitting down at the table, waiting, as usual, for Lui to wake up and search through his huge suitcase for clothes, Nonna warms up to us. Not right away. She withholds the butter and frowns at my request for tea instead of coffee. But then, out of the blue, she brings us the jam she has made just this week. From a Sicilian fruit. It is heavenly.

We ask about this foreign fruit, and as she's describing it, a man brings one in from the kitchen to show us. We don't recognize it. He places the yellow gourd on the table next to my mother. He likes my mother; everyone does. I remember as a child, how the train conductors would flirt with her. When they heard that she had six other children besides me, they doubled their appreciation. Once, she met a poet on the train and he published a poem about her. My father had it illuminated; it hung in our hallway forever. In Yugoslavia, two men became so enamored of my mother that they followed her—on the train, on the bus, into the hotel. They watched her walk to the swimming pool in her pink robe and strapped-on swim cap. They watched her during dinner in the 1930s, movie-star dining room, from behind the potted ferns, their hands parting the stems, their Laurel and Hardy faces poking out between the fronds. She is seventy-three and still irresistible. She is beautiful, I know, but I think people love her because she is so interested in their lives. She has it figured out: the man with the gourd is the owner of the hotel. He agrees, and she continues: the nonna is his mother, the knowledgeable waiter of the night before is his son. And the small boy who appeared after dinner last night with the unsolicited lemon apperativos, placing the tiny glasses so carefully upon the table? The owner gets his own coffee and sits down to rest with us. My grandson, he says. He tells us the story of his hotel and his children. It is a hard life, he says, but a good life.

In Taormina, we meet Aldo. Before my father orders us coffee, Aldo is already laughing. He jokes with us as he serves the coffee. Lui is a salesman, he says. How did he know? I ask. This is magic, and I love magic. Ah! The face! He points to my father—that one is a professor. My father smiles with the compliment. It is true, I tell Aldo. My father was an engineer, but now he is a professor. Now he writes books. Aldo, it turns out, also writes. He has written poetry. But mostly he is an artist. Before he brings us the coffee, he brings us his portfolio and a magazine with an article about his work. He points out pictures of himself with Walter Matthau. They look a lot alike. He thought Walter Matthau was a fine American. He shows us his poetry. There is one poem about the house his father built. A humble house, a humble poem: a tribute to his father, who talked with bricks and mortar rather than with words. My eyes tear up; like Aldo I am sentimental. My father built our house too, I say. Like Aldo, I am still so proud of my father.

One picture in his portfolio is of Mount Etna. This is good, says my sister, because we have been in Taormina a whole day and haven't seen the volcano yet. Only, this Mount Etna, we see, as we continue to stare at its simple geometry, is more than a mountain. The top of the mountain is a triangle of white snow: a snow cap. And astride it is a menstruating woman, her pubic hair an up-ended black triangle, her brown thighs the sky, her red blood the lava flowing down the mountain. This is interesting, I say. Woman is a volcano. Aldo smiles and looks to my beautiful sister. Very symmetrical, she says, and turns the page.

In the meantime, my mother has been chatting with three carabinieri in the park. When my father and I find her, they are showing her the pinenuts they pick up as they make their rounds. Pesto? I ask. I ask this with the reverence of a girl brought up on the Ligurian Coast. They laugh, and sigh, and agree. My father and I sit next to my mother, and after we, too, have seen the little nuts in their hard cases, my father tells the carabinieri the story of how twenty-seven years ago he brought the entire family to Sicily. This is a story we tell at every town. Seven kids, my mother navigating, my father driving a big rented van through the tiny streets. For some reason, the people we tell it to appreciate this story as much as we do. It was good to bring the family to Sicily. It is good to return, even if we aren't from Sicily and we are not the whole family.

My father's story leads up to Selinunte. In some ways, this whole trip has been leading up to Selinunte. Selinunte is our next stop after Taormina. It is also our favorite family story. How my parents, with a vanful of kids, were lost at night, in the middle of cold, dark nowhere, tired and hungry, with not much cash in their pockets. The map said there was a town called Selinunte nearby, but when we got there, all we could see were a few grim buildings. One had an unconvincing sign that read Hotel Miramare. It is a family phrase, now, Hotel Miramare. It is a phrase that means my mother coming out to the van, ecstatic with the news that they had room for all nine of us—only ten thousand lire—less than two dollars apiece! It is a phrase that means finding ratty slippers slipped under the bed and dirty shaving brushes propped up on the sink. A phrase that means skeleton keys, cockroaches, a terrifying toilet, and pubic hairs on the pillows. A phrase that somehow, at the same time, means waking up in the morning to a completely different world: a sunshiny beach, brilliant blue water, and, just up the hill: ruins, ruins, ruins! I don't know who noticed them first, but we ran up the hill to explore them before breakfast. Pieces of broken red pottery stuck up everywhere in the mud. You could see the designs on them: a flourish here, a leg there, a dress, a spear, a chin. In the bright green and yellow grasses, we found statues, and mosaics, and jars—huge jars, many of them still trapped in the ground that had settled over them 1,500 years ago. My sister Katy jumped into one of them. This is what means Hotel Miramare.

When we get to Selinunte this time, we look for Hotel Miramare. It is still hard to find Selinunte—even harder to find the hotel; they have built apartments everywhere. At the ruins there is a fancy, glassed-in ticket booth now, and all the statues and mosaics and jars have been carted off to a museum. My parents are not sad about the changes. The temple is still magnificent, and the man in the ticket booth teaches us how to check for counterfeit money. (Yes, he says, I have a machine. Of course. Of course. You use the machine, like this, but you must look at the face across from you. The face—the face will tell you more than the machine, he says.)

In Selinunte we tell everyone we meet our story, but most of the people have moved there within the last ten years, and they are not interested in the past. We do eventually find someone who lived in Selinunte twenty-five years ago. He shows us where the old building had been, and how the road had been built up, and where a new Hotel Miramare now sits. We walk by this strangely fancy reincarnation on our way to the restaurant that night.

We decide we like Selinunte better than Agrigento. The guidebook says that at Agrigento we will be able to see the Greek columns from our hotel, Baglio della Luna. It is a name we laugh at, in part because baglio sounds like sbaglio—mistake—which is what we have been making time and time again as we circle the temples in the dark, looking for the road to our hotel. The columns are gorgeous. Lit up by orange lights, they are sharp and stunning, solid against the thick, black night. But by the time we get to the hotel, my mother is unimpressed by the view. We have been looking at them from every angle for the better part of a half-hour. Her back hurts and my father is unwell, but they are too stoic and stubborn to admit a need for comfort. The rooms are not what she expected. However, before dinner my mother smokes a cigarette in the courtyard and meets a couple from the mainland. This couple spent more than two hours looking for the hotel—more sbaglios than us, my mother is able to report. She likes the hotel a little better now.

Everyone is glum at dinner: it is not Sicilian food, it is fancy food. The restaurant is noticeably vacant and its cheer is forced. The waiters are correct and the wine is expensive. There is lipstick on my glass, my mother says. She pushes it aside, remarking that she is not wearing lipstick. I am especially gloomy. I'm starving, I hate everything on the menu, I miss my husband, my single room is much too single, and instead of the temples, I have a view of the road. When I was washing my face before dinner, my sister came in to tell me to put a towel up against the door, because there were lizards in the hallway. I'm terrified of lizards. And I am worried about my parents. I have only seen my father ill once before. It scares me.

But we are not gloomy for long; my parents have a way of finding fun. At Baglio della Luna, they find Michael Jackson. She wears purple from head to toe. And then more purple on top of that: purple hat, purple gloves, purple shoes. Some sequins, some leather, some silk. Her stratigraphical makeup completely distorts her face. As she enters the restaurant, my father and my sister eye her discreetly. Lui gives her a good stare. My mother has craned her neck around to look. I want desperately to do the same. "Would you look at that," says my sister under her breath. "A certain je ne sais quoi," says Lui in a dreamy voice. "It's Michael Jackson," says my father. We laugh. She orders everything and eats nothing.

She is traveling with three other people. Two limousines—one for each couple, my mother tells us the next morning. They are being chauffeured around Sicily in limousines. We don't mind waiting for Lui to come down for breakfast today; today he can take as long as he likes: we want to see what Michael Jackson wears when she is being chauffeured around Sicily in a limousine.

Suddenly, too soon, it is November 4th. We know that for sure; we are in Mondello, our trip is over, and we are going back to America again. Dates have become important. I walk down to breakfast arm in arm with my parents. It might be my last trip with them, I think. Things get so busy; who can take time off work? Who can afford to go? Lui is late again, but not late enough to let us miss the plane.

In the car on the way to the airport, we go through the family ritual of "favorites." For Lui, it is Segesto, where the sky was a perfect, photo-blue backdrop for the main temple. "And the woman!" my sister laughs. On the hill where the theater and Greek houses are still being excavated, we saw a top-heavy, topless woman. My father had pointed out the sign up ahead: it is prohibited to disturb the workers. He figured she was going to be in violation.

My sister's favorite is Casa Amerina, a huge Roman villa with incredible mosaics. One room shows Roman women in sport-bikinis lifting barbells. It looks so modern. It is 1,700 years old. My mother agrees: Amerina was the best. But she liked the hotel in Siracusa. My father still likes Selinunte best. Item #1: Temple G. Item #2. . . .

For me? What to choose? Cefalu? Taormina? The mosaics at Monreale? Erice in the fog, where we saw a huge Mercedes make it around a tight corner by going up on two wheels? I try to be logical and go back to the beginning of the trip: the first night in Palermo. When it started to rain, we ended up in cafe. Even drinking coffee with my parents was a gas and a half. We laughed for an hour straight. Then, the Baroque church we walked to when the rain refused to stop: the man in the pew behind us was talking on his cell phone. To God, my dad had said. The umbrellas we had bought on the street when we left the cafe; 10,000 lire for one, the little boy said. We needed three...

Three for 20,000, my mother said; she always gets a bargain.

No, said the little boy, Three for 30,000 lire. He knew his math.

The rain came down, but the price stayed the same. We watched in awe as an eight-year-old Sicilian boy bested my mother.

But I was too slow; the conversation was turning and I hadn't said anything yet. Quickly, then: my mother's excitement during the hunt for hotels; my father's patience as she checked them out. My parents divining restaurants. My parents finding friends everywhere. The guide at Morgantina, who wouldn't let us interrupt him, because he had his tour speech memorized by rote. The three women who sat with us at breakfast one morning and told us the story of their night out with an old woman who swore she had the soul of a horse and identified an animal soul for each of the women. It had been un carnevale al tavolo, they said. The baby who kept pulling on my mother's red sweater in Taormina. The man at the coffee shop who led us to the highway for Agrigento when the main road had been washed out. The young missionary who stopped us in the dark rainy street because she heard us speaking English and she was desperately homesick. The family at La Vigneta. And Michael Jackson. Aldo. The three carabinieri. Lina, signora vigilante. And Salvo: Salvo, Salvo, Salvo, Salvo.

In the end, I realize that my mother was wrong: it is not who you meet, it is who you travel with. But I cannot say this. We do not love like Italians in our family. I think it was something my mother read in a book forty years ago: Do not tie your children down with love; let them go, let them be independent, don't trap them with the sentimental. And so I cannot tell my parents how much I love them, how much I worry about them. How hard it is to watch my father eye a slope and decide not to attempt it—my father who has never, ever backed down from anything in his entire life. How hard it is to watch my mother shift in her chair in pain—my mother who swims with such grace that she still makes people's heads turn. I want to tell them how much they have taught me about living; how valuable their lessons are to me.

And then it is too late for any talk at all. We are at the airport. We unload our luggage and laugh when Lui's huge suitcase gets stuck on the conveyor belt. It is bigger now; it bulges with gifts and dirty laundry. At the gate, we notice that everybody around us is carrying pastries. Huge packages wrapped up in the glossy tissue paper I remember from the bakeries of my childhood. Pink or white or tan, with gold lettering. And ribbon, which I remember the bakers tying so quickly. They could tie up a package without even turning it over.

The three old men in the corner have pastries. The girl in the brown dress has pastries. The four middle-aged men in business suits have pastries. Cannoli, my father guesses. We make faces: too sweet. But my mother wants to know for sure. And so, it turns out the trip is not over yet: My mother leans over my father and asks the young couple. . . About the pastries. . . ?

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