by Jann Huizenga

“Now I must go move my cows,” says Fabio in Italian. “Do you want to see my farm?” The invitation seems innocent enough, and I readily agree. Certo! In my desultory Sicilian life, there’s nothing I don’t want to see, no frontier to my curiosity.

We fold ourselves into his little yellow bee of a Fiat, briefly trail a truck brimming with oranges out of Ragusa, then buzz down the arrow-straight road toward Marina di Ragusa, windows at half-mast, my hair whipping around. The landscape is dotted with sheep and white rocks, one indistinguishable from the other. We veer right onto a narrow coastal road toward Santa Croce, the Ionian shimmering moiré-like off to our left. Spring has burst out all over. Everything hums and glows. Sprays of Spanish broom—my all-time favorite—explode like sparklers along the sandy roadside while tender blooms of pink bougainvillea and vermilion geraniums clamber impatiently over the perfectly stacked drystone walls, stretching their new necks toward the warm breath of the sun.

Then we’re heading back inland, bouncing along on a serpentine lane past dusty blue agaves and groves of whorled olive trees straight out of a Van Gogh. I get a whiff of Fabio’s spicy cologne—Sicilian men perfume themselves lavishly—and study, in a dispassionate sort of way, the muscular hand gripping the gearshift. I bet he gets those big bear paws from squeezing cow teats all day long.

Around another bend, meadowlands undulate as far as the eye can see—a smiling ocean of yellow blooms, interrupted here and there by a massive carob tree. Not a soul or edifice in sight. Should I worry? Don’t be paranoid. Where in hell are we going? Just relax. Fabio’s busy rhapsodizing about the 56 types of grasses, clovers, and herbs that grow in these pastures, modestly attributing the international success of his artisanal cheeses to the flora that enfold us.

I point at the masses of oxeye daisies bordering the lane. “Le mucche mangeano anche queste?” Do the cows eat these too?

“O, no, the daisies are only for playing she-loves-me, she loves-me-not.” He shoots me a look.

I’d met Fabio the week before, when my friend Mary, her husband, Enzo, and my sister Linda had gone to eat fresh ricotta at a masseria, dairy farm, owned by Fabio’s cousin. They’d cooked up a huge copper cauldron of steaming ricotta for us, and grilled coils of fat sausages. Then we’d all broken bread together around a long table draped in gummy oilcloth, dunking the crusts deep into the floaty-as-chiffon ricotta—Sicily’s ultimate comfort food, which turns surprisingly stone-heavy in the belly.

Enzo had arranged the outing with Fabio—a casual acquaintance of his—in his usual bighearted way, because I’d posed a simple question: How do you make ricotta? The answer turns out to not be so simple. For two long hours, I’d scratched notes as Fabio poured and mixed liquids and stoked the fire, pontificating all the while in Italian—but when I got home the notes made no sense. My photos are clearer: a ruddy Fabio stirring the hot pot of foamy whey over roaring flames; an agile Fabio straining to get the cauldron off the fire once the liquid had clotted; a jovial Fabio bringing up ladlefuls of diaphanous curds for our red clay bowls; a languid Fabio basking, after all the hoo-ha was over, out on a stoop in the sun.

“Allora,” he’d said then, squinting up at me. “Sei scritore? You’re a writer? I can help you with your research. You will write about our cacciocavallo ragusano. Next week, I will show you how we make it. It’s famous, you know.”

I was dimly aware that day that this contadino, farmer—a decade my junior—was friggin’ gorgeous, registering the fact in the same detached way I admire the Doric pillars at Agrigento. “We should be Hollywood talent scouts,” my L.A. sister kept raving during her visit, “and bring these heartthrobs back to Hollywood!” Fabio’s a doppelgänger forVince Vaughn, though a bit blonder and buffer. I attribute his caramel coloring to recessive Norman genes dating from the Norman occupation a thousand years ago, which still pop out quirkishly in the Sicilian population like toys in Cracker Jack boxes.

We’ve just toured a high-tech research lab on the outskirts of Ragusa dedicated to preserving traditional cheese-making techniques, where Fabio periodically delivers vials of milk for testing. Scientists in white coats huddled around computer screens and shouted into cell phones in funny English. A few told me they’d recently returned from a cheese conference in Vermont. Others were eagerly talking about the upcoming Slow Food conference in Torino, which Fabio also plans to attend.

In the car, he asks if my sister has left Sicily. For the first time, I notice his boot-shaped sideburns. Is that the Italian peninsula on his cheeks?

“Si, e mio marito arriva fra poco. Yes, and my husband’s arriving soon.”

“Oh, how long have you been married?”

“Over twenty years.”

His eyes go round, and his sugar tone turns to vinegar. “Vent’ anni?”

He says he’s doing lo scapolo, leading the bachelor life. Hasn’t found the right woman. Likes a quiet life alone in the country.

We pull into his bone-jiggling cobbled courtyard, where a pack of dogs rush pell-mell at us. I reach down to pet one, a slip-up that fuels the frenzy of the others. They launch themselves at me like rockets on a rampage. We escape into Fabio’s cottage as he points to the two-story villa next door, where his mother lives.

Aha! One of Sicily’s quintessential mammoni, mama’s boys.

His thick-stoned cottage, dark and homey as a bunker—why do so many Sicilians live like moles?—is a typical, no-frills man-space with a raw, cheesy smell. The dining table sags under a veritable hummock of dirty dishes. He’s in the middle of a renovation, hoping to turn the house into an agriturismo, a farm version of a bed-and-breakfast.

The kitchen, Cheese Central, is a new addition. Tiled wall to wall and floor to ceiling in white—European Union regulations for sanitation, Fabio explains—the kitchen feels like a public restroom at Penn Station. White globs ooze in mesh baskets on countertops, presumably becoming cheese. Whether or not the whole operation would be deemed hygienic by EU standards, I’m not qualified to judge, but some innate Martha-Stewart-ish compulsion makes me want to tie back my hair, roll up my sleeves, and scrub those tiles till my hands bleed.

“Ragusano used to be made in wheels,” Fabio says, indicating the block-shaped cheese baskets, “but the wheels didn’t fit into the suitcases of the emigrants leaving for America. So cheese makers began producing it in blocks.” The Great Migration, a heart-wrenching exodus of five million dreadfully-poor southern Italians from their ancestral villages a century ago, never fails to move me. But still, I laugh. Italians are so chauvinistic about food.

Fabio seems to want to linger in the house, but I edge us out the door into the light. The day has unfolded bright as a white sail. The garden makes up for what the house lacks. There are fragrant mulberry, lemon, fig, and citron trees. Dwarf palms and huge prickly pear plants with dangerous, leathery leaves. Almond trees wave in glorious bloom.

We walk out to the barn, where a half-dozen cows eye us in their docile, long-lashed way, flicking at flies with their tails.

“Sono incinte,” he says. They’re pregnant.

The animals have ivory-tawny spots, pink nostrils, and names like Hope and Happy. They carry their babies for nine months, Fabio informs me, just like humans. The calves will come soon. He forks hay into their mangers as I photograph. Ah, pastoral life! It seems exotic to me.

“You should play them classical music. I’ve read that cows like Vivaldi.”

“Yes. I have to remain very calm when milking them. They can feel any human stress. Since milking is already stressful for them, they must be made to feel very calm and happy.”

He tells me that farmhands from India are pouring into the area to help out on Ragusan dairy farms, and that Hindu cow worship makes these immigrants ideally suited for the job. “But the Indian I’ve hired,” he says, “shows too much reverence. I lose patience with him.”

We go out to the pasture to bring in the cows. One side of his property is edged by groves of carobs and olives, another by an arroyo that runs to the sea. Fabio bounds through the sweet, knee-high grasses toward his cud-chewing cows and does a series of demented jumping jacks to shoo his charges back to the barn. He’s in his element. Click click. I snap away. He picks handfuls of herbs and grasses, grinds them between his palms, extracts the kernels, and funnels them into my cupped hand. I look and let them fall to the ground. He pours more.

Why does he keep doing this? He’s got a monstrous fixation on seeds.

The cows back in the barn, Fabio asks if I want to see the bonsai carob tree he’s discovered growing in a rock out beyond the orchard.

By now I should be braying, “I’m on to you, buddy!” I don’t.

He whisks me off through the glossy-leafed carob orchard, then blazes a trail through a thicket to the wild place. We hear birdsong and the babbling of an underground spring and emerge into an absinthe-green lotusland smelling of chlorophyll. Here is Sicily at her sweetest—green and ripe and soft.

“My secret spot,” he says. “I’ve never shown this to anyone.”

And there, as in a fairy tale, growing from a large, round rock—a Lilliputian carob tree. My heart leaps.

“Molto romantico,” he says. “No?”

Ah. His lair.

“Dipende.” It depends. Gulp.

“Di che cosa?” he asks. On what?

I have the scary sensation of being a teenager again, enduring some kind of creepy courtship ritual—and try, furiously, to ignore him. Dum-do-be-do. Spout some silly-ass rubbish about the tiny old tree.

His lips curl into a laugh. “You can’t call a tree anciano, old! You can only say a person is anciano. A tree, and everything else, is vecchio, old.”

“Your language is an incubo, nightmare.”

Then we’re in a field of clover, climbing toward the olive groves. The air is warm and I catch a whiff of the sea. It comes into sudden view on the horizon, no more than a kilometer away.

Fabio keeps climbing, scrambling over a waist-high wall.

“Dami la mano,” he says. Give me your hand.

I give him my elbow before jumping down, holding my camera tight. Then, just like that, he’s looming over me, face tilted downward. He’s got the gentle brown eyes of his bovines.

“Sei bella. You’re beautiful.”

I keep walking with studied nonchalance—smack dab into an olive bough. Tomorrow I’ll have a scratch across my forehead, a trophy of the moment.

“Hasn’t anyone in Sicily told you that?”

Nuh-uh, unless you count the homeless man who roosts in a cardboard box out in front of Oviesse department store. My otherwise oh-so-loving husband, let’s be frank, has grown a little miserly with compliments—like so many men, I suppose, in easy, long-term relationships. Is that why these two little words bewitch me so? I can hardly keep my limbs from twirling around the orchard. I feel pret-ty, oh so pret-ty!

Get a grip, for crying out loud.

It’s alarming how charming I feel!

Helios, at its zenith, bursts in the cerulean sky. I feel dizzy, I feel sunny, I feel fizzy and funny and fine!

Married men of America, are you listening?

I glance Fabio’s way, half-expecting to see him prancing about on furry haunches and hooves.

“Devo andare a Ragusa,” I say. I’ve got to go to Ragusa. Back to work.

We scramble over more rock walls, taking a roundabout way back to the car. He chivalrously extends his hand at each stony barrier, but I tell him I can manage on my own. We maunder through more fields. Then—the ambush. His big bear paw is parked on my waist, pulling me close. “La mierda!” he laughs, Cow shit! I’ve almost stepped in it, or so he says.

Oooh, bravo! Such earthen wiles.

We pass a pomegranate tree festooned with last year’s red fruit, which hangs like Christmas ornaments. “Mi piace!” I say, To me it pleases! Just to keep prattling.

“Come tu piace a me,” he purrs. Like you please to me.

Is this what he had in mind when he said he’d help me with my research?

“Of course it is,” Mary will say later. “Americans are so literal. What did you expect?”

I dunno. Not this.

I hurry us into the car. Phew. Jig’s up. Or. . . not. Fabio turns on the engine but doesn’t move. Out of his mouth comes something weird that—translated directly from the Italian—is, I’m pretty sure, more or less the following: “I have a big desire to make the love with you, little potato.”

Never underestimate a Sicilian.

It’s high time to dispel, once and for all, this single-minded notion of his that I’m some kind of freewheeling, footloose, happening American woman. I affect the body language of the Pentagon. “What will Enzo think when I tell him you’ve been talking to me, a married woman, this way?”

“He’ll say, ‘It’s normal. You’re a man. Of course you should behave like this.’ ”

His words are so guileless that I have to believe him. I squirrel them away in my head, so that later I can perform a postfeminist analysis of them, and this is what I’ll conclude: His little speech—besides showing what Luigi Barzini calls the “shameless directness of Italians”—is a window into the mind of the Sicilian Everyman.

What I do next is completely un-Sicilian. I look at my watch and say I’m in a huge hurry.

Back on the road in the salty wind, we trade Bush and Berlusconi jokes, discover we both lean to the left. Fabio high-fives me and asks, in his perfectly dogged way, what I’m doing tomorrow, the next day, the day after that. I harden my heart. Busy, occupata, every single second until my husband, Kim, arrives, I say. But the truth is, it hurts a little.

We’ve arrived at Piazza del Popolo. As I gather my things, my beau tries to wangle “just one more walk.” He assumes a hangdog look and a fervid tone: “Ti prego, I beg you.”

You might think I cave, but you’d be wrong. I plant two pecks on his cheeks—the rote Sicilian arrivederci—and escape intact. Kudos to me! And end of story.

Almost. I inhale a deep lungful of air and think how eager I am to see Kim. To take him by the hand and show off all the virtues of this Treasure Island—wild asparagus, sharp smells of lemon groves, mounds of blood oranges, artichoke fields stretching as far as the eye can see, a white-tipped Mount Etna, the whole whirling world of springtime in Sicily.

As I watch Fabio’s little yellow car buzz around my piazza and disappear out of sight—Adío! Adío!— a nagging question keeps playing in my mind, as if a needle’s stuck in a groove.

But who’ll say I’m beautiful now?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 15th, 2007 at 3:34 pm and is filed under First Annual Solas Awards Winners, Great Stories, Love Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.