Saggezza

I promise I do have happy things with Aspasia written.

I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom.

Aspasia was barely seven years old when her papa first caught her fighting with her thirteen year old brother. After Alonzo pulled the squirming ball of indignant fury off of a shell-shocked Antony and, in his quiet but no-nonsense way, worked out the dispute between the two, Alonzo took her to another part of the backyard and spent the next two hours explaining when such use of physical force was justified—and how to employ such force.

Eight years later, she would use those movements to put an overconfident boy in his place—that was, despite what he seemed to have been thinking, not in her pants.

Alonzo was always a firm believer in spending time together as a family, and it was easy to center said family time on food. Before she was ten, Aspasia had spent more hours than she could count watching him move around the kitchen, pouring spices here, somehow knowing exactly what would make that sauce perfect, never needing a recipe. She asked him once why he never read what he needed from a piece of paper like her mother did, and, after a hearty laugh, he told her that was because his mother, Aspasia’s Nonna, always said the best cooking came from the heart first, instinct second, common sense third, and never from a book. He had then tapped her nose gently with his forefinger and turned back to the simmering pot, still chuckling.

Almost ten years later, a smiling boy would shake his head at her as she danced around his kitchen, haphazardly dumping this, mixing in that, always with a dash of cinnamon thrown in just for fun as she hummed under her breath. Somehow, though she never measured a thing and could never make the exact same thing twice, everything she ever cooked for him turned out to be roughly the same degree of wonderful.

Celestina Aleron was the strongest person in Aspasia’s world, always. She was the anchor that held their family together. She certainly held Alonzo together. And yet, when she was sick, Aspasia watched from a somber distance as Alonzo held his own pain at bay as he held her mother against his chest. Aspasia would recall for years afterward how, one night, upon finally creeping back into the house, she slipped past her parents’ bedroom. The door was open a crack, and she saw Alonzo cradling Celestina; her mother’s face was hidden against his chest, but tears streamed down his face as he murmured the melody of an old lullaby. The fondness in his movements as he brushed what was left of her long, glorious hair in the hospital, the utter devotion in his eyes as he held her hand gently while each spasm of pain she tried so hard to hide wracked her body, the redness of his eyes that told everyone he’d been crying, though except for that one time, by chance and accident, Aspasia never saw him actually break down—observing this, Aspasia learned what real love looked like.

Years later, the same boy who laughed at her cooking methods would find himself cradled in her arms, held against her soft body as fingertips played through his hair. And as he shook and cried and let out some of the unbearable pain of loss, soft Italian words whispered against his ear and wrapped around him almost as comfortingly as the security of her embrace. Eventually, he would be lulled to sleep by the steady heartbeat beneath his head, her lullaby echoing in his mind and the reassurance of her deepest love securely in his heart, and he would know what real love felt like.