The Wedding Officer

27

SPRING HAD arrived, as hot as an English summer. You could tell which men had recently been at the front line by their sunburn, and the municipal gardens along the seafront were filled with hawkers selling food and drink—freshly squeezed lemon juice into which a teaspoon of bicarbonate was stirred to make it froth, which the soldiers had discovered made an excellent hangover cure; spasso, a mixture of sunflower seeds and other nuts; and pastiera, a cake made from grain and ricotta. The people of Naples did not look so gaunt now. The Allied Military Government had finally opened up the food markets again, and fresh produce began to pour into the city: still expensive, but full of nutrition and vitamins. Now when James took a siesta he had to close the shutters of his bedroom against the heat of the midday sun, and even in his office he worked in shirtsleeves.

His feelings for Livia might be hidden, but they were no less intense for that. Every time he heard her in the kitchen, singing, his heart soared with her voice; every time she put a plate of food in front of him, his passion fed on the sight of her slender hand, just as ravenously as his mouth devoured her cooking. When she brushed past him, it was as if her light summer dresses were made of stone, so acutely did he feel the slightest touch. When she smiled, he felt as if he would burst with pleasure; when she frowned, he ached with the urge to put his arms around her and talk nonsense until she smiled again. At night she floated to his bed and inhabited a bolster: When he gave free rein to his most feverish imaginings, he could almost have sworn that she kissed him back, urging her feather-filled body against his with little cries of pleasure. After these fantasies had reached their natural conclusion he felt filled with self-disgust, imagining how appalled Livia would be if she knew that he was borrowing her body in this way for selfish sexual release. But by morning he would once again be in a frenzy of unfulfilled passion, like a very ripe apple that only needs the slightest touch to send it plummeting from the tree.

With the black market apparently under control at last, he was no longer so busy. But every moment not spent with Livia was a moment wasted. He spent hours sitting at his desk trying to think of reasons to go and talk to her. Bloody Eric, of course, had ample opportunities with his English lessons, while he had to make do with everyday chat. But there were only so many times each morning one could wander into the kitchen and ask casually, “What’s for lunch?,” whilst the weather, always such a good conversational opener at home, was not quite so obliging here in Naples, since the phrase “Hot today, isn’t it?” could only ever be answered with an affirmative.

Then he had an inspiration.

The next time they were alone together, he asked Livia if she would teach him to cook.

She stopped what she was doing, taken aback. “That’s a big thing, to learn how to cook,” she said warily.

“Not everything you know, of course,” he assured her. “Just the easy stuff.”

She considered. In Naples, there were very few men who cooked. In fact, there was no Neapolitan word for “chef,” it being assumed that all cooking was done by enthusiastic amateurs. But James, after all, was a finocchio, and given to womanly pleasures.

“Well,” she said, seeming to come to a decision. “I’ll show you a few things, and we’ll see what kind of pupil you are. How does that sound?”

When James was doing his basic training, back in England, there had been a sergeant major who delighted in terrorizing the young officer cadets. On the first morning he lined them up in the freezing dawn. “I will address you as ‘sir,’” he informed them menancingly, “and you will address me as ‘sir.’ The difference is that you will mean it.” His favorite technique involved shouting instructions at them so rapidly and at such deafening volume that it was almost possible not to become confused, thus inciting their tormentor to unleash ever more voluble streams of invective.

James was reminded of this sergeant the moment he started trying to learn the basics of cooking from Livia.

“We’ll begin at the beginning,” she said, chopping some ingredients together on a board, her knife a blur. “This is a battuto. Parsley, lard, onion. It’s the base for most of our sauces. And garlic, of course. But we add that later, or the onions will overcook. Only a lazy cook puts the garlic in at the same time as everything else. Here, you try. No, not like that. Chop the parsley into small pieces, like I told you.”

“Actually, you didn’t mention—”

“And then you must simmer them in some oil. That’s a soffritto,” she said. “Battere, soffriggere, insaporire. One, two, three. What are you doing? You don’t stir the onions until they’ve had a chance to cook. Don’t forget the oil. That pan’s too hot; it will burn the onions in a moment. Don’t cut the garlic, crush it. Ay, ay, ay, now your pan is burning.”

“This is too difficult.” He sighed, taking the burning pan off the heat.

“Nonsense. You just need to listen more and talk less.”

The problem, he realized, was that she herself had never actually learned to cook—she had simply assimilated it, along with speaking and walking. For her to teach him what she knew was as hard as explaining how to breathe. Eventually they agreed that she would carry on doing what she usually did, and he would try to copy her, asking questions when there was something he didn’t understand.

The next morning he accompanied her to the market. “The first thing you have to understand is that in Italy we don’t cook dishes, we cook ingredients,” she said. “First, we decide what looks good, and then we buy the other things we need to go with it.”

“So what are we looking out for today?”

She shrugged. “Who knows? Perhaps some fish. Tomatoes. Vegetables, of course.” She picked up a zucchini from a basket and bent it in her hands. “This was picked yesterday, which is why it’s a little limp.” The zucchini snapped, and she tossed the two pieces back into the basket dismissively. The stallholder bellowed at her, protesting that his zucchini were the freshest in the market and who was going to pay for the one she had just ruined? Ignoring him, Livia plunged into a melee of shouting Neapolitans around a fish stall, jabbing with her elbows until she had inserted herself into the very thick of the throng and emerging triumphantly with a slab of swordfish the size of a tree trunk.

“On the other hand,” she told him, “if you see something really good, you have to be prepared to fight for it. Now we need some peppers, to make a salsa.”

A little farther on she managed to find some zucchini she was happy with, and back in the kitchen he watched as she sorted them into two piles, one of wrist-thick vegetables with veined orange flowers at the end, the other of star-shaped open flowers.

“These are pretty,” he remarked, picking up one of the blooms.

“They taste good too.”

“You eat the flowers?” he said, surprised.

“Of course. We’ll have them stuffed with mozzarella, then dipped in a little batter and fried. But only the male flowers. The female ones are too soft.”

“I hadn’t realized,” he said, taking one and tucking it behind her ear, “that flowers could be male and female. Let alone edible.”

“Everything is male and female. And everything is edible. You just need to remember to cook them differently.”

“In England we say, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”

“How very stupid. A goose has a light taste, so you would cook it in a gentle white wine sauce, perhaps with a little tarragon or oregano. But a gander has a strong, gamey flavor. It needs rich tastes: red wine, perhaps, or mushrooms. It’s the same with a gallina, a hen, and a pollastrello, a cock.” She glanced sideways at him. “If the English try to cook a pollastrello and a gallina the same way, it explains a lot.”

“Such as?” he asked, curious. But she was busy with her cooking, and only rolled her eyes at him as if the answer were too obvious to mention.

Later he watched as she took one of the delicate, velvety blossoms and dipped it quickly in a bath of batter. She held it for a moment above the bowl, allowing the excess to drip away, then transferred it to a large pan of hot oil, where it bubbled and spun. She added another, and another, and moments later, the first batch was cooked, lifted out with a slatted spoon and transferred to a piece of newspaper to soak up the oil. She threw some salt over them, then picked one up and bit it with a critical expression on her face. Evidently it met with her approval, because she nodded and held it out to him.

“Taste. Go on, they’re best when they’re hot like this.”

He held her wrist to steady it. The batter had cooked to a translucent crust, crunchy and brittle as the most delicate pastry. Inside, the flower had softened, an insubstantial mouthful of fragrance that dissolved to nothing in his mouth.

She was watching him, waiting for his reaction, but all he could think was that he was holding her wrist, and her beautiful lips were only inches away from his, dabbed with fragments of that fragrant batter, just as his own were. He put out his tongue and licked the fragments up, tasting them, knowing that this was how she would taste if he kissed her now.

“Wonderful,” he agreed, reluctantly letting go of her hand. “It’s absolutely wonderful.”