The Food of War

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.