Ciao Catania
excerpt from What Women Don’t Say, a novel
When Stefania picked me up at the airport, I could tell that the weight of my visit was beyond her capacity. Out of duty to her father, she had traveled south to Catania as soon as the school year finished, because he wasn’t feeling like himself. Stefania had already lost her mother and was determined to keep her father alive.
“What is a person without family?” she said.
In Turin, Stefania was free, braless, and always at the head of the table. In Catania, I saw another side: a hunched-over woman at the mercy of her father and brother. When her brother, Giovanni, entered a room, she would get up to fetch him a drink or offer to make him a meal. Stefania, who had once made me believe she would never be a man’s keeper, was now lining up her father’s and brother’s underwear on the clothes rack on the terrace, as if it had always been her job to prepare their meals and iron their shirts.
“Bella, how beautiful to see you,” she said, but I wasn’t convinced she meant it.
It hadn’t occurred to me that Stefania might have invited me to Catania out of obligation, or that her generosity stemmed from people-pleasing: prioritizing my needs and desires over her own.
In Catania, we shared a small room with two twin beds in her father’s apartment, the same room she had shared with her brother growing up. Her father owned three cats that roamed in the courtyard, returning to sleep in the apartment at night. Giovanni slept in his grandmother’s old room, and his father slept way down the hall by the door, where he kept a bell he would ring at all hours.
“Make sure the cats are back inside before you close the doors on the terrace,” her father yelled.
“Va bene,” Stefania said repeatedly, with incredible patience.
Ring. Ring. Ring.
“Where are the cats?” her father asked again.
“Non preoccuparti, stanno bene,” Stefania assured him.
In the apartment, everything remained exactly as it had been when Stefania was a child: the custom wooden cabinets with gold knobs, the patchworked marble tile floors, the dusty chandelier hanging above the small wooden dining table, crowded into the living room, which also held a sofa set covered in thick plastic.
When my mother first arrived to New York from the Dominican Republic, she too had covered our sofa with plastic—so it could last. But not anymore. “That was for when we were still campesinos,” my mother would say.
“Non preocupare,” I told Stefania. “I’ll stay out of your way.” I wasn’t sure if she understood me.
Giovanni, who had Stefania’s pronounced Sicilian nose and large dark eyes, took his role as tour guide for l’americana seriously. We drove quietly toward the center of the city. He pointed out historic buildings, encouraging me to look out the window. He spoke in Italian, but his speech was so filled with dialect and local slang that I couldn’t understand a word. Still, I had become adept at listening through gestures, reading eyes, lips, shoulders, and feet. I could tell he was proud of his city’s history and eager for me to be surprised and delighted.
We parked and then strolled into the mouth of the fish market, where weathered fishermen hollered and fish glittered: a treasure chest of neonati, silverfish, swordfish, shark, clams, oysters, bluefish. We waded through the strong smells of fresh herbs, stagnant water, ripe peaches, tomatoes, bananas, cantaloupes, and roasted onions.
Giovanni instructed me to zip my purse and hold it close to my body. I hid my camera and took photos from my hip, capturing purple stilettos tapping on the lava-brick pavement, a child’s hand yanked by their mother. We didn’t walk through the market; we flowed with it, dodging the motorcycles and the quick-footed young men with crates balanced on their heads.
“Vaffanculo,” he yelled, hands in the air, fingers pinched together, flipping me off.
To save me from the men looking for a fight, a vendor waved us over, yelling, “Prova, prova.” Giovanni kept close like a bodyguard, his body wide and stocky. I asked the vendor, who had hair like a sail and tartar-filled teeth, for a peach. He handed me a rotten-looking one, advertising kilometro zero: fruit with minimal carbon footprint. He kissed his fingertips and said, “Buonissimo,” the very best.
“Che brutta,” I said, refusing it.
Giovanni intervened and said, “Lei e Americana.”
“Anche Dominicana,” I added, afraid the vendor might mistake me for one of those ugly Americans who were loud, never satisfied, and who liked to return things. Even when a store had a return policy, Stefania never ever returned anything. But Americans—for any little thing, they expect only the best, or what they think is the best, for their dollars. American tourists are loud, spread out their bodies when they enter a room, order cappuccinos in the afternoon, and wear flip-flops around the city. I had been teased plenty for my Americanisms, and learned to blend in more.
“From New York,” Giovanni added.
“Ah, que bello, New York,” the vendor laughed and handed over a nicer-looking peach, giving me the ugly one for free. “Forse impara qualche cosa,” he told Giovanni.
Away from the vendor, I bit into the ugly peach, fleshy and sweet. Giovanni delighted in watching me suck the juices like a child. He took me to the lava shore to sit on a large slab of volcanic rock. He gestured for me to take off my sandals and put my feet in the water.
“Ti piace, Catania?” he asked.
Mi piace, I thought. Catania was agreeable; I felt in harmony with it. Maybe it was the sweet peach in my mouth, the pungent smell of fish, the Mediterranean Sea, the salt on my lips, the humid air that hugged all of my body, the chaos of the mopeds and scooters, the yelling at the market, the foreboding Etna that cast its shadow over us, showing off its eruptions while we dipped our feet in the water. It reminded me of my time in the Dominican Republic. That turquoise sea, warm and thick, like bathwater, striking against the black lava stones.
Catania refused to accommodate me, a tourist. It couldn’t care less if I felt safe or comfortable; it demanded acceptance, it treated its visitors like one would treat a family member. The invitation: wrestle with Catania’s reality or get the hell out.
When we returned to the apartment, Stefania served a tray filled with arancini, large risotto balls stuffed with cheese and ham, some with ragù; deep-fried and delicious.
Her father, Gian Carlo, asked me, “Sei capace di apprezzare a Catania?”
“Do I understand things in Catania?” I asked Stefania.
“He say, do you like Catania?”
“Sì,” I said to her father.
I wrote down the words sei capace and apprezzare, because I liked the way they sounded, how the words felt in my mouth when I said them. Later, I looked it up because Stefania had a habit of simplifying translations. In fact, he didn’t simply ask if I liked Catania—it’s never that simple in Italy—he asked if I was able to appreciate Catania. If I was capable.
I believed I was.
Stefania was busy being her father’s chauffeur, even if he could drive; his housekeeper, even if he managed all year to clean and wash his clothes on his own; his bookkeeper, administrator, and errand runner. When appropriate, Stefania invited me along to do errands, but for the most part she or Giovanni would drop me off in the center of the city so I could be the American writer.
“Che bello, essere scrittrice,” Stefania said not without a touch of envy. She didn’t have the luxury to walk leisurely around the city to read a book at a café and revel in boredom, waiting for inspiration.
The night before my departure, Giovanni picked me up at the center and drove me home for our final family dinner: a feast. For appetizers, Stefania served cartocciata—fried dough stuffed with mozzarella, ham, and tomato sauce—and caponata to eat with the fresh bread, toasted with a drizzle of olive oil.
“It’s essential to add currants and capers. Without them, the caponata has no tension, capisce?” her father told me.
I took notes. With her father, Stefania prepared a pasta alla norma. They had prepared the tomato sauce in the morning, before I was even up, because nobody wants to rush the sauce. “Si arrabbia,” he laughed. And because pasta alla norma has just a few ingredients, each and every part of it must be of the highest quality. “So use San Marzano tomatoes,” her father said. “Can you find them in America?”
He made me hold an eggplant to demonstrate its weight and density.
They had bought the eggplant from their contadino, who had set it aside exclusively for them. Stefania sliced it thick and salted it for thirty minutes to draw out the moisture and bitterness, then patted the slices dry. When she fried them, she made sure not to overcrowd the pan. Step by step, Stefania and her father moved around the kitchen as if they had cooked together for years. Next to him, she seemed smaller, less fierce. He spoon-fed her the sauce, and she poured him a glass of wine to sip while they prepared everything. I hadn’t imagined Stefania’s father being so warm and loving; she had always made him seem so cold, and she had described her brother as a lost cause. When his father needed him, Giovanni would disappear for days. Stefania said he was only around because she was home and he wanted to benefit from her care and cooking.
That night, we ate together. Everything was so lovely. I felt good about my trip, even though I was unsure if my presence was a burden to Stefania. But then, in the middle of the night, the bell rang. It was her father. It wasn’t the first time he had rung the bell while we were sleeping, but this time Stefania shook me awake to ask if I had left the terrace door open in the living room. I had drunk so much wine and feasted on such a delicious meal that my head was heavy. I thought I had closed it; I remembered her asking me to latch it, as we did every night, so the cats couldn’t get out.
The gray cat with one green eye had escaped and been hit by a car.
The next morning, Stefania struggled to look at me. She asked Giovanni to drive me to the airport so she could stay with her grieving father.
In the car, Giovanni reassured me that everything would be okay. I felt awful. I gathered that his father had too many cats. Giovanni didn’t like them; they stared at him all the time. He also said Stefania never said thank you and that he was a slave to his father. “Take me here. Do this. Do that. A slave,” he repeated. The more he talked, the angrier he seemed to become at Stefania.
“Non preoccuparti,” Giovanni said repeatedly, “the cat was old.”
He urged me to look out the window and take a last look at Etna, exhaling smoke from its mouth.
