It’s not unusual to talk about food at our family reunions. It’s not unusual to complain about the ingredients we need and cannot get here, in order to prepare that recipe we are craving. To fulfill this craving is to honor who we are and where we came from. To make a good ceviche, we say, we need tiger shrimp. Arroz con leche must have real cinnamon sticks, coconut for a delicious flan, ciruelas for bread pudding, sapote for sapote syrup. 

We eat until our mouths become lazy from all the chewing, and when we talk we always head back to childhood. Bread—in all of its varieties and occasions—is always mentioned. There is nothing better than the early evening snack we walked to buy at the baker’s. 

He owned a store on the main boulevard, with a nice window and a rattan basket on the counter full of old bread, baked in the morning, that people could take for free. The evening bread meant our homework was already done, meant picking up our friends on the way there. It meant crossing that busy boulevard and my mother’s voice caught between the door’s screech and the serene—look both ways! It meant the 6:30 wind would come, offering relief and the scent of peace, and fresh evening bread you could smell a block away. 

Sometimes we arrived just as La Panadería was opening for the afternoon shift and got to see the iron front as it went up and let out the smell of rising yeast. They called the round, brown bread with yellow squares on top cara sucias. 

Our job was to bring back two bags full of different kinds of breads: cachitos, what we call croissants, and palanquetas, our version of Italian bread, for sandwiches. Every Friday we walked to my mother’s cousin’s house, where the adults gathered to play poker. We took all of the bread we purchased that afternoon, and my parents brought along a bottle of Rum San Miguel. 

All of us kids loved their place. It was a tall house with an open terrace off which long verbena leaves hung. When we approached the house before sundown, their yellow centers appeared to us as feeding bees. After midnight, light bulbs. The house had three floors and a black, iron spiral staircase that served as a spinal cord uniting the three floors. 

While the adults played, we were in the next room with our second cousins. We often drank so much Coca-Cola our voices were louder than the game. There were eight of us in total and us younger ones played as if we were in a distant field, though our voices gave us away during hide-and-seek. 

At midnight came the snacks, three slices of mortadella, two slices of cheese, on sandwiches with lettuce and tomatoes held by buttery toasted bread. Light bouncing back from our faces as we sat in circle. As we walked home, in the dark, my mother’s tipsy laugh was a cascade. Anything made her giggle or laugh. I could hear her heels as we took shortcuts through cobblestone streets. The elegance of their parental step, as they held hands and walked ahead of us. My father was her best friend, always laughing with her. Their stride started and stopped in sync; their outlines our point of reference.

We couldn’t have imagined that just a few years later we would be separated from our parents, that they would come to New York for some scrappy survival and we would stay behind. They were so far from the cobblestone streets on the way to my cousins, far from our two-story house near the baker—who for years sent his regards to my absent parents, as did the butcher, and the neighbors who put their own letters inside of the ones we sent to them. 

Our first week in New York, we took great joy in food shopping. We had shifts for pushing the shopping cart as we rode the aisles. Our eyes took inventory of everything we would like to taste. All five of us followed our parents past the shiny cellophane-wrapped candy. We wanted big bags of anything. We had not walked as a pack for many years. 

Standing by the fruit section, under the lights, someone asked my sister if the mango in her hand 

was ripe. This was not the same mango we ate at home. This mango was bigger and greener, ours was yellow and small. To eat it you peeled it with your hands, took it to your mouth, let the juices run their way to your forearm. My sister couldn’t say so she shrugged her shoulders. Soon, we learned to pick from the pile, looking for signs of maturity. A red shadow appearing at the bottom, an intense yellow on one side, and finally, squeeze hard with one hand.

Silvia Bonilla holds an MFA in poetry from the New School. Her work has been featured in/is forthcoming from Pittsburgh Journal, Green Mountains Review, Rhino, Reed Magazine, Cream City Review, and Pen&Brush, among others. She has received scholarships from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Colgate Writers Conference, and The Frost Place. She recently received a Fellowship from The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. You can find her at: https://www.bonillasilvia.com/about.html

The street lamps kept dangling from disrepair, the balconies crumbling, the unemployed young men shuffling from café to aimless walks, yawning even in their thoughts—a scene worthy of Fellini’s neorealist film, I Vitelloni.  Fellini at his ironic best sets overgrown teenagers in a coastal town, a band of young bulls taunting road workers and pulling immature pranks on girls and women. My father said his kids needed a different future.  Frasca Studio would soon close and one more family, my family of four, would become a statistic of the Sicilian diaspora. I had never heard the word “diaspora” until I came to America. In my hometown that history was not taught in school, far as I know.  People just left. Like seeds transported by the wind one day they disappeared. Occasionally I’d hear my mother say that so and so, the American, was in town. That so and so could have a surname familiar to us, or one that had been Anglicized. The mysterious Mr. Nicholson might be searching for a distant relative—Nicosia.    
We saw types on the streets of Vittoria during summer months.  Mr. Nicholson in plaid shorts, white sweat socks and laced-up spectator shoes, walking with a small dictionary in hand—trying his best to ask for directions to somewhere his fourth cousin might be living.  My friend Anna & I made fun of that guy. What was up with those tube socks paired with elegant leather shoes? But his Ray-Bans were more than acceptable to two girls wanting to tint the world a splendid green.  O how we wanted to rip those aviators off the foreigner’s nose and take turns sporting them at the beach. Leap from one rock to the next, lean on every yew tree, look foxy sniffing the northern wind—Tramontana—cool on the skin.  And we’d throw in some Paul Anka —Put your head on my shoulder, Baaaby, feeling euphoric though we didn’t understand the words.  It’s hard to convey how that singer’s dreamy voice on my transistor gave rise to lidless imagination.  Opportunity for a pose, look a bit coy. Tilt your head. There. No. It was better before. Keep the sunglasses in mind.  Can’t you think of something more miraculous?      

Here and there we’d see another American but demanded nothing from the Showoff, Buffuni—one hand pushing back his thick swirls of hair, the other spread on the steering wheel of a Peugeot convertible too big for cruising our narrow streets.  The Buffuni wore his shirt unbuttoned.   His gold necklace was thick as a fishermen’s rope. This clown made tons of money flipping pizza dough, my older brother said.   One good bet he came back to look for a wife who cooks like his mother. She’ll polish his shoes, his teeth, his nuts and his toenails just to get to Brooklyn or New Jersey.  My eighteen-year-old brother, Aldo, who could not openly hold a girl’s hand, carried around his little angry monsters and made Anna and I laugh until we almost suffocated.   

If this isn’t important, nothing is, Aldo said.  In the beginning God created an American for us to see on Via Cavour.  A nostalgic old man, teary eyed, in and out of cafés, tasting every flavor of gelato until the metal shudders shut.  The bogus noble in suit jacket with the widest lapels you ever saw and polyester pants that never lose their crease, U Babbu Amiricanu, the Dumb American.  All over town the air is thick with rumor that a speeding motorcycle flipped him in the air and he thumped on the ground like a 65- kilos sack of potatoes.  Aldo could not get his mind off how mannish that violence was. Anna asked to hear more. My mother slapped herself hard on the forehead, called her son Malacunutta, a word I find impossible to translate.  It doesn’t mean not being polite—more like a fired-up entertainer setting hungry wolves to attack a poor captive bear.

I was nine years old, it was the place I happened to live in and be the victim of.  What did I know about Mr. Nicholson longing to find his ancestral roots? What of those who had not quite died in the old country and not yet been born in the new, how they disassembled, reassembled, flying back and forth like the osprey’s need to return to its birthplace.  Each had a personal survival at stake but who could see any beauty in that? This doesn’t quite answer the question: why are people obsessed with stereotyping? In my hometown we thought of all Italian Americans as “dumb” outsiders who dressed badly. They thought of us as their precious heritage.

Marisa Frasca is the author of Via Incanto: Poems from the Darkroom (2014—finalist for the Bordighera National Poetry Prize) and Wild Fennel: Poems and other Stories (2019, Bordighera Press).  Her poems and translations have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, among them: The Stillwater Review, Italian Americana, TheRed Wheelbarrow, Journal of Italian Translation, The Yale Poetry Series Anthology,Making Mirrors: Writing /Righting for and by Refugees Anthology.  Frasca is the recipient of the Outstanding Riggio Scholar Award, 2010, from The New School where she received a BA, and she holds an MFA in poetry from Drew University.  She currently serves on the Advisory Board of Arba Sicula, a non-profit organization that preserves and disseminates the Sicilian language, literature and folklore.  Born in Vittoria, Italy, Frasca lives with her husband, Peter, in Manhasset, New York.