The woman from her region was named Assunta, which was an old-fashioned name that you rarely heard anymore and that made my mother’s face soften when she said it because it was the kind of name that belonged to a specific era of southern Italian life, the kind of name your great-aunt had. Assunta had come to America in 1971, three years after my mother, also for a cousin, also for work that was available, also having left behind a family she had spent decades not having the money to go back to.
They were the same person, more or less, arrived at the same place by different roads.
They had coffee on Wednesday.
They had coffee the following Wednesday.
By the fourth Wednesday, Assunta had brought her daughter, who was my approximate age and who worked in healthcare administration and who I met when I went to pick up my mother.
The daughter’s name was Rosa.
We shook hands in the parking lot of the coffee shop where our mothers were inside talking.
She said: Your mother told my mother about the restaurant. About Enzo. Apparently they have been talking about nothing else for three weeks.
I said: I know.
She said: My mother has been calling relatives in Italy. People she hasn’t spoken to in thirty years.
I said: Really?
She said: Yes. Apparently hearing your mother talk about the village made her remember things she had put away.
She looked at me.
She said: I didn’t know she had put things away. I knew she was from Italy and that she had come here young. I didn’t know how much of herself she had translated.
I said: I’ve been learning the same thing.
She said: It’s a lot.
I said: Yes.
We stood in the parking lot.
She said: Thank you. For taking your mother to that restaurant.
I said: I didn’t know what I was doing. She wanted to try the food.
She said: That’s usually how these things happen.
Our mothers came out.
Assunta and my mother were in the middle of a conversation that had apparently reached its conclusion, both of them with the specific pleased quality of people who have just established something important.
Assunta said, in Italian, to Rosa: We are going to Italy.
Rosa stared at her.
Assunta said: In the spring. Giulia and I are going to Italy.
Rosa stared at me.
I stared at my mother.
My mother said: It is time.
I said: Mom. Italy.
She said: Yes. Italy. The place I am from. I have not been there in fifty three years. I think it is time.
I said: Can you—I mean, the travel, the distance—
She said: I am seventy eight years old with a cane. I am not dead. I can get on a plane.
Assunta said, in Italian: We are not so old that we cannot go back. We are old enough to know we should go before we cannot.
My mother looked at me.
She said: I want to see the village. I want to see the church. I want to see if the square is the same.
She said: I want to go before I die, and I would rather go with a friend than alone.
She said: Assunta’s daughter can come. You can come. We will go together.
I said: Mom.
She said: What?
I said: Yes.
She smiled.
She said: Good. Assunta knows a travel agent.
This is how the Italy trip started.
I am telling you about it because it is the direct consequence of the birthday, of the restaurant, of Tara’s ignorant cruelty and Enzo’s recognition and the pastiera made from a dead woman’s recipe. The trip would not have happened without all of it.
The planning took four months.
My mother and Assunta were meticulous about it, in the way of women who have spent their whole adult lives being careful with money and who approach any significant expense with the thoroughness of people who cannot afford waste. They researched flights. They compared hotels. They consulted with people who had made similar trips. They made lists.
Enzo helped.
He called his cousin in Naples, who knew people in the region, who knew someone in the village who ran a small bed and breakfast and who would give them a good price for five nights.
The village still existed.
This was not something my mother had been certain of, in a specific way that I had not fully understood until she said: I was afraid it might not be there anymore. I was afraid it would be parking lots.
It was not parking lots.
It was, according to Enzo’s cousin’s report, substantially the same, smaller in population, the young people having moved to cities the way young people everywhere moved to cities, but the church was there and the square was there and some of the families were still there.
The Marchetti family was still there.
Enzo’s nephew and his wife, third generation, lived in the house across the square.
My mother was going to go back to the village and across the square was going to be a Marchetti.
We flew in May.
My mother, Assunta, Rosa, and I.
I had never been to Italy.
I want to tell you what I expected and what I got, because they were different in a way that I am still absorbing.
I expected beauty. Italy is beautiful. Everyone knows this.
What I did not expect was the specific quality of watching my mother move through a landscape that had made her. She moved differently there. Not more easily, physically, she still needed the cane and the walking was slow. But the quality of her presence was different. She looked at things with recognition. Not the recognition of places you’ve seen in photographs, but the recognition of places your body remembers, the specific angle of a street, the way the light comes through at a certain hour, the smell of a bakery that is chemically identical to something you smelled fifty years ago.
She cried on the plane landing.
She said: I forgot how the light looks.
I said: The light?
She said: In Italy the light has a quality. I cannot explain it. I forgot.
We stayed in the village for five days.
On the second day, we went to the square.
Enzo’s nephew was waiting.
His name was also Lorenzo, which was Enzo’s full name, and he was in his fifties with his uncle’s quality of presence, the specific warmth of someone who greets a stranger as though they have been expecting them.
He had been told the story.
He shook my mother’s hand.
He said, in Italian: My uncle has been talking about you since last fall. He says you are the best student of Italian cooking he has ever met.
My mother laughed.
She said: He has been teaching me for months. I have been teaching him.
He said: He calls you on Sundays now. After your lunch.
My mother looked surprised.
She said: He told me he was calling his wife.
Lorenzo said: He calls his wife first. Then he calls me and talks about you. About what you remember. About the village.
He looked at the square.
He said: He has not talked about the village like this in years. It is good for him.
My mother looked at the square.
She said: It is the same.
Lorenzo said: Mostly. The bakery closed. There is a different one now, down the street.
She said: And the Romani house? My family’s house?
He said: There is a family there now. Different. But the house is the same.
We walked to her family’s house.
She stood on the street in front of it.
She looked at it for a long time.
The house was the same in the way of things that are substantially unchanged but have been inhabited by time: the proportions were right, the door was the same wood though it had been repainted, the garden her mother had kept was gone, replaced by a small paved area.
She said: My mother’s garden was here.
I said: I know.
She said: She grew tomatoes.
I said: You told me.
She said: The best tomatoes. I have never found tomatoes like them in America.
She stood for another moment.
Then she said: All right. I have seen it.
She turned around.
She walked back to the square.
She sat on the bench by the church, the same bench she had sat on as a girl, and she looked at the square.
I sat beside her.
She said: I thought coming back would make me sad.
I said: Is it not?
She said: It is a little sad. But it is also good. It is the same kind of thing as the pastiera. A different version of the memory. Not better or worse. Just the actual thing, instead of the version I had been carrying.
She said: It is good to see the actual thing.
We sat in the square.
Assunta and Rosa were somewhere in the village, also walking, also looking at the actual thing instead of the version they had been carrying.
The church bell rang.
My mother crossed herself automatically.
She said: In all the years. Every time a bell rings. I still cross myself.
I said: That’s home.
She said: Yes. That is home.
We went back to the bed and breakfast for lunch.
The woman who ran it had made food.
Of course she had made food.
We ate on the terrace with the mountains in the background and the afternoon light doing what it does in the south of Italy in May, which is be absolutely unreasonable in its beauty.
My mother ate everything.
She had been eating everything since we arrived.
She said: You cannot get this in America. Not exactly.
I said: No.
She said: It is the water. The oil. The wheat. Everything grows differently here.
She said: I did not realize how much I missed the taste of things that taste right.
I thought about Enzo in his restaurant kitchen, reproducing these flavors with American ingredients, achieving something close but not exact, not exactly the water and the oil and the wheat.
He had gotten close enough that my mother had said: It is my mother’s recipe.
That was not nothing.
That was, in fact, extraordinary.
We flew home after five days.
In the airport, waiting, my mother called Enzo.
She said: We are coming back tomorrow.
She said: I saw the square. I saw the church. I went to the house.
She said: Yes. The garden is gone. But the house is the same.
She listened.
She said: Your nephew was very kind. He looks like you.
She listened again.
She said: I have something to tell you. A recipe. For the tomatoes. The way my mother made them. For summer, with the bread. I know you will figure out how to do it with American tomatoes but I want you to have it anyway.
She listened.
She laughed.
She said: Yes. Next Sunday. Save me the table by the window.
She hung up.
She looked at me.
She said: He says the tomato recipe will be the best thing I have ever given him.
I said: He’s probably right.
She said: Probably.
She looked at the departures board.
She said: I am glad we went.
I said: Me too.
She said: I am also glad I live in America. I was afraid going back would make me regret coming here. But it did not.
I said: What did it do?
She said: It made me understand that where I came from is part of me and where I live is also part of me. They are both mine. I do not have to choose.
She said: I have been choosing for fifty years without knowing it. Choosing to be American because it was easier. Putting the Italian away. Translating myself.
She said: I am done translating.
I said: What does that mean?
She said: I am going to speak Italian more. I am going to make the food the right way even when it takes longer. I am going to teach my grandchildren some words.
She said: I am going to go back to Italy before I die. Again.
I said: We’ll plan it.
She said: Yes. Next year. Before I am seventy nine.
She picked up her cane.
She said: Also I want to try to grow tomatoes in the yard this summer. The way my mother did. I know American tomatoes are not the same. But I want to try.
I said: I’ll help.
She said: You do not know how to grow tomatoes.
I said: You’ll teach me.
She considered this.
She said: Yes. All right. I will teach you.
The flight was called.
We boarded.
My mother slept most of the way home, which she had not done on the flight out, the sleep of someone who has set something down that they have been carrying for a long time.
I watched her sleep.
I thought about the birthday. About the restaurant. About Tara’s face when the kitchen door opened and about Enzo on his knees in the dining room and about the pastiera and about Assunta and about the village square in May and about the tomatoes my mother was going to grow.
That girl at the hostess stand had seen an old woman with a cane and orthopedic shoes and had decided she did not belong in the restaurant.
She had been wrong.
She had been wrong in every way it was possible to be wrong.
But she had also, without knowing it, set something in motion.
If she had seated us quietly, we would have had a nice dinner and gone home.
Because she did not, Enzo came through the kitchen door.
Because Enzo came through the kitchen door, my mother spent the winter speaking Italian on Sunday afternoons.
Because my mother spent the winter speaking Italian, she met Assunta.
Because she met Assunta, they went to Italy.
Because they went to Italy, my mother stopped translating herself.
The cruelty was not necessary.
The cruelty did not have to happen.
But it happened, and what came after was also real, and my mother, who is a Catholic woman who goes to Mass every Sunday and forgives everyone because it is the most annoying thing about her, had already forgiven Tara by the time we were eating the pastiera.
She was thinking about the recipe.
She is always thinking about the recipe.
She woke on the plane as we were descending.
She said: I was dreaming about the tomatoes.
I said: What about them?
She said: I remembered how my mother planted them. She sang while she planted. The same song every time. I can hear her voice.
She said: I have not heard her voice in my memory in many years.
She said: It is nice to hear it again.
The plane landed.
We came home.
My mother’s Italian is a little louder now than it was a year ago.
The tomatoes did not grow the first summer.
They are growing this summer.
Everything, eventually, grows.
That is what my mother says.
She has been saying it for fifty years.
She is not wrong.
That is the whole of it.
The birthday.
The restaurant.
Enzo on his knees in the dining room.
The pastiera.
Assunta.
The village square in May.
The tomatoes, growing now.
My mother’s Italian, a little louder.
Her mother’s voice in her memory.
Still there.
All of it still there.
Everything, eventually, grows.
She has always known this.
She has just not always been able to say it in her first language.
She can now.
She does.
Every Sunday.
At the table by the window.
In the small Italian bistro downtown.
That is where you will find her.
That is where she is at home.
Her name is Giulia.
Not Julia.
Giulia.
She has been Giulia her whole life.
She is seventy eight years old.
She is going back to Italy next spring.
She is teaching me to grow tomatoes.
She is the most Italian woman I have ever known.
She is also the most American.
Both of these things are true.
She does not have to choose.
She never did.
She knows that now. That is everything. That is the whole of it. That is my mother.
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