by Tembi Locke
As I left the Ponte Vecchio toward home, I rode past the corner of Borgo San Frediano and Piazza del Carmine, and I looked up at the church across from my apartment. It boasts a fresco believed to be the first known work of the teenage Michelangelo. Firsts are no small things, firsts hold the beginning of something great. I suspected I had just fallen for a bicycle thief chef: and as clichéd as it might sound, it was love at first bite.
* * *
Love, as a lasting thing, was a concept that was elusive to me. My parents separated when I was seven, divorced by the time I was eight. My mother remarried when I was nine, my father when I was twelve. While I was in Florence, my mother was divorcing again after nearly twelve years with my stepfather. Throughout my childhood, I had lived in five different houses over the course of ten years. This parent’s house versus that parent’s house. Mom’s second house, Dad’s place as a new divorcé or the one he had as a newly remarried man with a child on the way. When my college friends talked about “going home,” they often referred to a specific place with a bedroom in which they had lost their first tooth or first sneaked a boy inside. That version of home was foreign to me. I didn’t have a fixed place to which I could attach memories. Sure, there had been houses, homes even, but they came with emotional caveats. I had had a kind of bifurcated childhood, trying to fit into whatever configuration of my parents’ life was presently in formation. It was common to my generation of baby boomers’ children. My parents, Sherra and Gene, were no different.
They had met as young university students thrust headlong into the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and ’70s and the Pan-African Liberation Movement, which we had grown up calling “The Movement.” My parents were desperate to reshape the United States into a more just and equal place. They married at the ages of twenty and twenty-two. They didn’t know themselves, and it’s safe to say they didn’t deeply know each other. I assume they liked the promise of each other. He was a student activist; she was the dean’s-list beauty who stood front row when he spoke on campus. They were idealists remaking the world.
As a result of their countercultural endeavors, my parents both had files with the FBI. My father had been jailed for inciting a riot. My mother had organized labor from within at a factory job while holding her position on the dean’s list at the University of Houston. I spent late nights with them at the African Liberation Support Committee, the former nuns’ residences of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Houston’s Third Ward. They typed leaflets while smoking cigarettes. The Staples Singers played on an LP in the background. My dad traveled with Stokely Carmichael, the former Black Panther, to Tanzania and Zaire to try to teach revolutionists on the Mother Continent the same resistance techniques they were using to take down the Man in America. It was a heady time, one that could easily subvert a marriage. And it did.
My name, Tembekile, was given to me by none other than Miriam Makeba, who at the time was married to Stokely. Makeba was the exiled South African folk singer known as Mamma Africa. She was also public enemy number one for the South African government. She sang about freedom, advancing an anti-apartheid agenda from Paris to Japan to New York City. By the time I was old enough to understand who she was, I began to spend hours wondering about this woman, this hero, this person who had chosen a name for me before I had even taken my first breath.
But it was learning about her in the fourth grade that made me first understand what it meant to be exiled. To be cast out of home. To have no home. I was not exiled, for sure, but as a kid I didn’t always feel rooted. At times I even fantasized about making a home with Miriam Makeba. I saw her as the godmother my atheist parents hadn’t given me. In my childish fantasy, she and I could be two exiled people, flung around the globe.
By the time my parents had turned thirty, the Movement was dissolving, and the Reagan Era was on the horizon. They, along with many of their generation, took a step back from the picket lines and began to figure out how to make a living in a United States that wasn’t all that willing to change. By now Sherra and Gene had two children—my sister Attica was born three years after me—whom they took along with them as they each, in their own way, began to reconfigure their own idea of family. They were already redoing adulthood in their formative years, already parents, already having experienced lost dreams.
Now in Italy, barely twenty years old, I was trying to decipher what made people come together and stay together forever. The idea that Saro had suggested, that a pairing could yield something great and lasting, was beautiful but untested. Still, when he said it, it felt real and possible. Even though I had extended my stay and I was set to return to America in a few months, Saro floated the idea that we could spend the summer together, that he’d come visit me at Wesleyan. One occasion after we had made love, he told me, “People eat all over the world. I can be a chef anywhere. You can only act in Los Angeles or New York. I will be at your side.”
I was willing to take a risk with him. There was something so utterly confident in his vision of our future. He was unwavering. He saw what he saw, and his every action inducted me into that vision. And I felt safe. Safe to open my heart, to be vulnerable. Safe enough to take a risk on something no one in my family had seen coming—a potential long-distance relationship with an Italian man twelve years older, without a college degree, who was banking on “cooking” as the means of supporting our future together. It was improbable, romantic, idealistic, unprecedented. The journey I was willing to take had no guidelines or examples I could look to in either my own life or the lives of my parents. His parents, from the little he had told me, had been married his whole life and lived in the town where they were born. Saro and I would be making our own way. There was no one with whom we could compare ourselves, no one to whom we could turn to for the ins and outs of long-distance, bicultural, bilingual, biracial love. That was scary, but it was also freeing. As though for the first time in my life, I was making a brave, bold decision of the heart that felt expansive, intuitive, a wish from my soul.
My family, on the other hand, had reservations. When I told my father during one of our weekly Sunday conversations from Florence that I was seeing a man, the mere mention of it when I was so far away from home, so young, set off his parenting alarm. To make matters worse, I was talking about staying in Italy even longer than the stay I had already extended. I told him I might not come home for the summer. Or if I did, I would work briefly at his law firm to make just enough money to buy a plane ticket back to Italy. That was all he needed to hear. He and my stepmother, Aubrey, booked the first ticket they could get to Europe. They left my three young brothers at home with Aubrey’s mom, the youngest of whom was barely a year old and whom I had met only twice. They boarded a plane to Switzerland, the cheapest my dad could find. Then they rented a car and drove across the Italian border, then south into Tuscany, and finally to Florence. He told me he wanted to see how I was doing, visit his daughter in Italy, and treat Aubrey to a brief vacation. What he didn’t tell me, but what I sensed, was that he had every intention of looking a certain Italian man in the eye. He had every intention of telling him to step the hell back, if needed.
Dad arrived in Florence in full Texas regalia, complete with cowboy hat, denim pants, and alligator boots. His jacket was suede, and I’ll be damned if there wasn’t some fringe on it. The sight of him coming down Via Calzaiuoli and filling Piazza della Signoria with his presence was enough to make me adore him just a bit more and also wonder what the hell I had set into motion. That he was going to meet Saro was nonnegotiable. In fact, he had casually suggested that Saro and I join him and Aubrey for a drink in “downtown Florence.” So Saro was set to meet us shortly after I linked up with my family. I was quite nervous, afraid that Saro would be so intimidated by my father that he wouldn’t say a word or, worse yet, would try too hard.
Instead he arrived on time and at ease.
“Nice to meet you both.” Saro shook my father’s hand and gave Aubrey a hug. “I was thinking we shou
ld have dinner together tonight. I’ve made arrangements at my restaurant.”
He was setting the tone for hospitality and transparency, things I knew my dad greatly respected.
But it was Aubrey who could see Saro’s love on view in plain sight. Later, after a walk through Florence, an afternoon of window browsing, and then dinner, she told my dad, “And don’t even think about objecting to their age difference. You and I are also twelve years apart. It’s plain as day how he feels, you do not have to worry about this.” She shot down any lingering doubt, assuaging my father’s concerns. Aubrey was Saro’s ambassador into my clan.
My mother would be a tougher sell. She was coming off her second divorce and had bounced herself into a new relationship with a man whom, ironically, she had met while visiting me in Florence. He was Senegalese, a diplomat’s son, Muslim, educated at the Sorbonne. He was the antithesis of my stepfather, the Mexican American, self-claimed entrepreneur, Armani suit–loving man with whom she had spent the last twelve years of her life. That marriage had gone up in a bonfire of lies, questionable business decisions, suspicions of infidelity, and other accusations I caught wind of. By the time I had left for Florence, the marriage had been coming off the wheels. My mother hadn’t talked much about it, or maybe I hadn’t let her talk much about it. Their separation was exhausting. My stepfather had been hard to feel attached to despite the fact that I had spent half of my childhood under the same roof. He was dodgy by nature, and it didn’t help that he liked to tease me for sport.
As soon as her divorce was complete, my mother had been more than happy to hop onto a plane and come visit. It was Christmas break, and I had never spent a Christmas away from home. As much as I loved Florence, I hadn’t yet started dating Saro, and I was terribly homesick.
As she and I sipped cappuccinos and sampled pastries in a café across from the Boboli gardens, out of nowhere she began a quiet but very determined inquiry into why I was studying in Italy at all. To her way of thinking, I was the child of activists, people who had instilled in me a sense of cultural pride and political awareness. I had been raised to sympathize with the challenges facing people of color across the African diaspora. Why, then, had I come to Italy, the heart of European culture, to study abroad? Why was I not in Kenya, like the daughter of her friend Mary from her former Movement days? Mary’s daughter was on a Fulbright and teaching Kenyan children English as part of her studies at Wellesley. Why was I not more like Mary’s daughter? And why in God’s name was I continuing to hook up with “white boys”? She wanted something more for me. And she took her time telling me so as we sat eating and drinking.
“But, Mom, I’m an art history major. My graduation requirement includes being proficient in either French, German, or Italian. Studying in Kenya—”
She jumped in before I could continue. “It’s about the bigger-picture life choices you are making. By being here you are virtually excluding yourself from the possibility of being with someone who is nonwhite.” Her Afrocentrism came with conditions, and at that moment those conditions included black first, second, and always.
“I don’t know what to say. I like being here, and I am not excluding anyone or anything.”
“Yes, you are. By virtue of where you are, you are excluding.”
It was a conversation from which there was no out. I would never win. I was the daughter of a black activist who was suggesting I had sold out. Pass me another slice of pizza, please. I knew she was having her say.
Once I began dating Saro, if my parents talked about it with each other, they spared me the details. Ultimately, when it came to affairs of the heart, each of them was wise and intuitive enough to keep a distance. They were willing to say their piece and then let their children either sink or fly when it came to love. No matter what opinions they might have had, at the end of the day, I believe they wanted me to be happy. And if it was a chef from Italy who made me happy, they were willing to support that. If nothing else, they had raised a daughter who knew how to follow her convictions and was also learning how to follow her heart. Somewhere, deep down inside, they might have even celebrated my bravery. The odds against our love were so improbable, so steep, but they had taught me to fight for what mattered.
* * *
By March, I was still renting a room in the penthouse apartment in Piazza del Carmine. One night I was waiting for Saro to get off work, and I sat up most of the night talking to a new American roommate, Cristina, from San Francisco who had filled me with stories like a tumbler of whiskey. By the time we adjourned, it was after midnight. My plan was to lie down just for a few minutes, rest, and wait for Saro to arrive in the piazza below sometime just after 1:00 a.m. It had been four months since he had bought me the bike and we had shared the ride across the Arno. We had a routine at this point that when he finished work at Acqua al 2, he left Florence’s center and rode across the river to Piazza del Carmine to wait outside my apartment. He would stand across the street from my building and wait for me to come to the front window. Upon seeing him, I would buzz him in. He couldn’t ring the bell because of one of my roommates, whom Cristina and I jokingly called “The Den Madame” but who was, in fact, a Canadian trust fund transplant whose name was on the lease on the rooms we sublet. She was famous for discontinuing the tenancy of any girl who took up with bothersome boyfriends. Ringing the bell after 10:00 p.m. qualified as bothersome.
When I awoke three hours later in a Chianti-induced sweat and full of panic, it was 3:30 a.m. I had gone so far and deep into sleep after my roomie’s tales of woe that I had lost sense of time and place. I sat upright in my tiny twin bed and immediately realized that something was desperately wrong. I sprang from my bed and nearly broke my neck running along the marble floor through the corridor to the front windows of the apartment, thinking I know he won’t be there. I’ve missed him.
When I got to the window, flushed with anxious nerves, the first thing I saw was that it was pouring rain. Shit! Really? Could this be any worse? As I peered out into the night and looked down, there he was. My Saro. His coat was drawn tight, his hair was a wet, soaking mess. He was looking up at the window of our apartment.
One look at Saro, and something new about him came into crystalline focus. This man, this chef, was showing me who he was deep down, the persistence of his character, his unflinching willingness. He had declared his love, he had laid out his vision, but now he was making that love an action. Standing in the rain, it was as if he were drawing a line in the sand. On one side of it, he showed me the kind of love I could have in my life with a man who was undeterred in his commitment, unafraid, clear about what he wanted—someone determined above all else to stand for love no matter what, no matter how. No matter.
On the other side of that line was another life. It was the one I had been leading before taking up with Saro, one rife with middling commitments and ambivalent relationships. The line was as clear and as black and white as any frame out of Neorealism. There was my new lover, a man kept waiting, standing in the rain past the point where it would have been understandable to leave. He was a man in love with me down to the bone. To wait for someone in this way, in this circumstance, was an extraordinary act of faith and love. But more still, it was the act of a man who was persistent, whose character was unshakable.
When I went downstairs to let him in, the first thing he did was wet me with kisses. As I helped him take off his jacket, the first thing he said was “I’m glad you woke up.”
* * *
Before coming to Italy, my father and I had gone jogging one day in his Houston neighborhood and he had given me a piece of sage advice. I might have shared my suspicion that my mother’s marriage was moving toward a swift and decisive end. I had just spent the summer working in his law office, where I often fell asleep during lunch. I was bored in the way that a college student is who returns home and hasn’t a clue as to what she should do next.
He sensed I needed to know something about relationships that had, until that mom
ent, been unclear to me. “Tembi, there are many people in this world that you can love,” he said between breaths.
“Okay, Dad, c’mon.” I was uncomfortable with the sudden intimacy.
“Now, let me finish.”
I didn’t want to show it, but he had my attention.
“There are many people, maybe even thousands, that you can love. But there are few people,” he continued, his words measured, “maybe only one or two on the planet, that you can love and live with in peace. The peace part is the key.”
He stopped short in his 1987 Bar Association T-shirt and looked me square in the eye. I hoped like hell he wasn’t going to ask me specifics about my love life. My dad was telling me something—the kind of stuff I usually overheard him say only when he shot the breeze with his friends over a glass of bourbon and local barbecue. It felt true. In relationships, real partnerships, the love is only as good as the friendship.
What I didn’t know was that loving someone long term, in that “peace” that I so desperately longed for, would also mean loving parts of them that remained unseen. As much as Saro’s heart was an open book, there was a mystery in him. My familial love was given, steady, open, even when out of sight. When he spoke of his origins, his family (which was rarely), there was a trace of pain, something unsettled, an air of disappointment I couldn’t quite identify. It was a part of his life that hadn’t yet been fully revealed to me. It would be soon enough.
