The Man Who Filled My Pockets With Oranges
Those first two months I thought you were homeless. I moved to our neighborhood in late September, back when Palermo seemed to rot and loose garbage masked the smell of the stigghiole — lamb intestines — barbecuing on the corner. Our street was the kind of street you’d only find in Sicily, not to be confused with the kind of street you’d find in Italy because the latter is enchanting and full of magic. Our street wasn’t charming or clean or anything of the sort. The buildings crumbled into one another, united by the graffiti that stretched through each apartment, each bar, each run-down, deconsecrated church. I sat on my balcony above your perch, straining to see the sea.
You spent your time beneath my apartment in a broken folding chair, your life’s possessions surrounding you like a fortress. On either side, plastic Carrefour bags overflowed with stray objects: a faded Gap sweatshirt you wore every other day, an orange jester’s hat that hid your gray hair, a broom you used to sweep the street during the quiet moments. There were a lot of quiet moments.
Between those bags was the citadel gate — a shopping cart filled with produce you’d spend all day trying to sell. Wilted heads of broccoli, bruised apples, miniature oranges you swore were in season. You were always propped behind your cart, your toes loose in those gaping rain boots that never once kept out the rain.
I was on a gap year to learn about my Sicilian grandfather, and on the days I discovered little about his past, I’d stay present-minded by watching you arrange and rearrange your vegetables. As I tried to find my footing in a foreign place, I became aimless, unsure how to navigate the inefficiency of an island so different from America. I didn’t understand how you could be so fulfilled, so full of purpose, when you never sold anything. You were content simply waiting for customers, chatting with the equally stalled waiters at the neighboring restaurants. Whenever I passed by your stand, you paid me no attention, preoccupied with your produce, immersed in your work.
Curiosity made me pause one day, and when I tried out the accent I could never master, buongiorno on the tip of my tongue, you didn’t understand what I was saying. Instead you handed me an orange and I mean this in the literal sense. You reached for my hand with those dirt-crusted fingertips and wrapped my fingers around the fruit, nodding with a toothless smile and a proclamation of gioia. You began to call me Joy.
I should have told you this months ago, but I don’t really like oranges, though I ate the one you gave me. Each morning, when I walked outside my building, oranges greeted me as though the transaction were just as much a part of your routine as sweeping the street. Even when I wasn’t hungry, I knew better than to say no; refusing would insult your livelihood. Once, I made the mistake of offering to pay which offended you, I know, so I never offered again. My daily orange became a talisman in my pocket.
When I came back later than usual one night, I saw you pack up your cart with just as many vegetables as when the day had started, and I realized you left during the evenings. No matter that your belongings came and went with you; you had a place to go, and I no longer had to lay awake in bed wondering how you could sleep outside when the neighborhood turned lively in the hours we could barely make out its appearance.
As my Italian improved, we talked sometimes, the two of us. When you saw me approaching, you often leaped out of your folding chair to offer it to me. I liked blending into the backdrop from a level lower than the one I knew. On the off-chance a customer came, you’d use me to sell your oranges. I was your success story. Questa Americana, le mie arance sono le sue preferite.
I was naive to assume you were homeless, because regardless of where you went in the evenings, — to an apartment, to a house, to a different street corner, I still don’t know — you certainly had a home on our street. You knew everybody and everything. You knew the building across from us back when it was still a church and you knew your perch beneath my apartment ever since your father worked there and his father and so on. You knew enough of our street’s history to fill those plastic Carrefour bags twice over.
On the days you didn’t ask me to sit, I’d slip my orange into my pocket and forget about it until my fingers would brush against something mushy and soft and wrinkled like your aging hands each time they opened mine to give me another and another and another. By the time December came around, my coat pocket was like a Christmas stocking, a reminder to eat something other than gelato, maybe, or a reminder that someone was looking out for the American, the foreigner, the lover of oranges, the girl on his block.
I admit I wasn't as grateful as I should have been, and I felt guilty each time the forgotten skins browned into something inedible. Whenever I had to discard an orange, I felt as though I was rejecting your livelihood, reducing your day’s labor to a fragment of my time, dismissing your pride and joy and selflessness. No matter how gaping the holes in your rain boots, how torn your sweatshirt, you gave with an excess — of oranges, of spirit — that made your place of work a place worth living for the both of us. You didn’t earn your livelihood from the produce you never sold but from the conversations and community that grounded you to that street and defined our city. Those oranges started my day, and I came to depend on them for no purpose other than the protective relief of knowing I’d formed roots in a strange city.
As I listened to your shopping cart clang down the cobblestones, I pried oranges out of my coat pocket and realized that they were to my pocket like character was to our street. You gave so freely because we were neighbors, and in Palermo that’s enough to be one and the same. Never mind that we didn’t share a background or a language or an upbringing; we shared an address.
The day I left for the airport, I rested my final orange on my suitcase and gave you a hug goodbye. You made me take the orange for the plane, but I ate it as my bus wound out of the city and through those crumbling neighborhoods I’d gotten to know beyond first glance, first assumption, first rejection. The orange was bruised on its skin, browned, maybe it was off-season by then, but inside it was sweet and it filled me up.