the orphan thief

Nuncio was the best cook I knew.  Disheveled and grinning, he was a combination hunter, tinkerer, fix-it man and kitchen wizard. He would present us with rabbit, cooked in wine, grapes and oranges for dinner, that hours earlier had been running through thickets. His preparation of lobster was simple and exquisite: plucked from a deep water trap, boiled, and anointed with olive oil and mint. He grew his vegetables, butchered his chickens, gathered wild herbs from the remote heights of the island. He climbed the mountain in the dark with a shotgun and a gunny sack and was back by morning coffee with killed birds and wild greens and flowers for the table. He hardly spoke; when he did, he mumbled.

My parents loved him like a son. My sisters and I loved him like a brother. He cared for us and we cared for him. When we arrived he would drive us to the house and we celebrated together at night with a feast from his kitchen.

He was like an orphan on Filicudi when my mother and father first met him. He came out of the hills of Sicily, never speaking of his family, working in my father’s cousin’s restaurant. He lived alone in a back room, wore the same clothes every day, and left fresh eggs and prickly pears in a bowl at the doorstep of my parents’ house. My mother cooked for him and he sat with my father on the patio under bougainvillea, looking out together at the blue Tyrrhenian.

My parents gave him love and they gave him money. Plenty of both. Now, seventeen years after my parents died, he has very nearly succeeded in stealing the house. In Sicily, it’s easier than you might think.

I’m on my way to take it all back — the house and my family’s loyalty. I go now with a trusted friend and armed with legal documents that prove our ownership and money for bolt cutters to snap the chain Nuncio has locked around the gate.

How could I think about food at a time like this?

I’m Italian.

On our way, Rick and I will hold over in Rome for three days. Each of us knows that city; our internal maps of pizzerias, trattorias, cafes and wine bars overlap. We share some favorites, living shrines to la dolce vita, where we will pray in appropriate ways: slices of pizza rustica at Forno Campo di Fiori; the morning cappuccino and the afternoon espresso at Sant ‘Eustacchio; fresh tagliatelle with white truffles at Settimio near the Pantheon. I will take all of these like sacrament.

The plane boards in six hours.