It
would not have mattered if it were April or November; the landscape was drowned
in a brown-grey, like farmyard mud flung into the sky, to be rained down over
the scenery like a drab watercolour painting. It did happen to be spring
however, so the brown-grey ground was now churned by an unrequited rainstorm
the night before. When the men were in the light of the dull sun, they were
greeted with the thick sludge they had hoped to be left behind in the previous
winter. One of the young men – for all men in war are young – picked up a boot,
resting diagonally on the uneven trench wall. His calloused fingers blended
into the rough material of the boot, as he lifted it, and tipped. Murky pond
water guzzled out, smacking the mud below and creating a welt from impact. His
name was Giovanni. While the other men scanned for items to save from the muck
they were stuck into, Giovanni’s stature remained, his eyes unmoved from the
boot, drips now falling from the inside of the boot. If he had bent down and
crouched close enough to the boot’s opening, he would be able to see the
bulbous world he now inhabited through the drop, before it soundlessly fell to
the manmade mud below. One of the men nudged Giovanni’s outstretched arm, but
only after a few moments more did he solemnly lower the boot. Turning away from
the wall, he leant against it with his elbows crooked, so only they would be
patched with mud and not his back. Still his eyes were almost unmoved from an
unspecific spot, as the savoured boot stood by his side.
In
that moment, the very instant of tipping this army boot, with rain water
gushing from its innards, rippling the ground below him, surrounded by a bleak
yet unforgettable landscape, hankered with men attached to lives they may never
drag themselves back to again, Giovanni felt all that came before him implode
in his head.
Filippo,
a man – a boy – a year younger than Giovanni, had entered the trench with his
uniform as smart as a major and as clean as if his own mother had bathed it.
Even when being sucked into the brown-grey of their war, Filippo did his best
to keep his head above, like someone determined not to drown, keeping clean
habits even when every implement was bathed in mud. It was one of the first
times that Giovanni had ever heard the thunder of bullets, sharper than blades,
stabbing through the air, the wasteland, the skin. And there lay Filippo, his
mouth agape, caught in a startled shout like a bird mid-song, his chest
exhibiting the mud mixing with his blood through the holes in it.
When
they were travelling to the barracks, even Giovanni’s dark curls that had so
attracted the attention of all of the Italian mothers in his town did not
differentiate him from the hundreds of men cooped in the trucks, transporting
them across the countryside. The fields were brimming with golden greenery,
with vines stretched along the width of some, trailing up sticks to guide them
straight. Giovanni only witnessed this because he sat on the very end of one of
the benches, and could have stuck out his head and let his curls dance in the
slow breeze they were leaving behind. That was when he had first seen Filippo,
with his neat clothes and a nose as straight as if he too had splinted it like
the baby vines in the fields. But then, they were all men, and they were all
going to war.
Before
they were politely loaded into the deep green trucks, Giovanni had never
considered another life than the one he had in his restaurant, Colomba Blu, named after his girl. She
perched, her long legs under a blue dress the colour of forget-me-nots in the
turning of summer, pleasantly crossed under her seat, peering at the menu. The
white paper contained the names of five dishes, not a niche place but that of
simplicity, as Giovanni was fond of. After her third visit, in the same seat,
under the lemon tree that swooped over the tables like a shade for Goddesses,
Giovanni’s father mentioned the lady, with her high cheekbones and hair that
captured the sunlight that was then bright and incandescent. After a week more,
Giovanni served the food himself, ruffling his hair out of sight with the lemon
tree, before greeting the lady with her dish. It was always the same: Lo speciale di Giovanni. He would later
lament about her: she was like a dove, his Colomba,
he would think, with her pointed yet soft features and feathery, drawn-out
voice. When they were soon afterwards together, and Giovanni’s father had given
the restaurant solely to his son, he named it after her. Her favourite dish was
always on the menu.
Surrounded
by this brown-grey scene of bleak destruction, what had softened the memories
to float them to the surface, from the congealed suppression Giovanni had
forced, was not the tasselled photographs or crumpled letters with curling
fonts, but the boot tipped of its rainwater. To Giovanni, the sight of thick glugs
falling into the soupy mud reminisced of the day many years before, when
Giovanni’s father had asked him into the kitchen of his family home, later to
be overrun with food menus and sauce spillages from the family restaurant. His
father, square hands softened by the flour that haloed them, beckoned Giovanni
up onto the wicker stool, which barely sagged under his toes. With this
leverage, he observed his father making pasta; an origami of food. Bestowed
with a spoon, Giovanni loyalty never left the side of the cooking pot, bubbling
pulpy sauce, stirring tentatively and attentively so it would not begin to
coagulate. Once both were completed, the sauce was ladled onto the fresh pasta,
glinting with a varnish of egg wash. His father called it Lo speciale di Giovanni and it transcended through every draft and
redraft of menu, a changeover of owners – from father to son – and staff, the
influx of customers and that one special girl, and it followed him here. Only
the taste would tell Giovanni that the liquid that came from the boot was not
brimming with fresh tomatoes from the porch garden, dancing under the sun on
top of the devotion and care of family. It was just murky rainwater. And he was
in a war.
