The Wedding Officer

30

YOU SEE,” James explained, “love isn’t just something you feel.

Love is something you become. It’s like—going to a new country, and realizing that you never particularly liked the place you left behind. It’s like a sort of tingling and—oh, I don’t know—when she smiles I just want to start clapping or something. Look, I’d better shut up, I seem to be talking the most awful nonsense.”

The girl, who was called Addolorata, put her hands together and smiled. “No, that’s exactly right!” she exclaimed. “That’s just how I feel about Magnus too.”

“Magnus is a lucky chap,” James said. He realized that he had not, in fact, asked Addolorata very many questions so far about her finanze, or her financial situation. It seemed inconceivable, however, that he should turn her application down, given the splendid way they were getting on. “Look,” he suggested, “I’ve got to write this report, but it’ll probably help you a bit if I tell you first what the best answers to my questions are. For example, if I were to ask you what you’ve been living off…”

“An uncle sends me money,” Addolorata said quickly.

“…you might turn out to have stolen some money from a German. No Germans around now to check with, you see. Uncles have a tiresome habit of being contactable.”

“That’s what I meant—I stole it from a German.”

“Excellent,” he said, beaming at her. “I think this is going to go rather well.”

Later, as he typed up his report, Livia stuck her head around his office door. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Marrying someone.”

“Who’s the lucky girl?”

“Addolorata Origo. It’s not me who’s marrying her, actually, it’s a captain in the Highlanders. I’m just helping.”

“Well, if you’re not going to be long, I thought we might go for a walk,” she said casually, producing a bonnet he had not seen before. “It’s sort of traditional at this time of the evening.”

He had seen the young couples strolling arm in arm down the Via Roma, and he knew putting yourself on display like this was an integral part of Italian courtship.

“Livia,” he said, his heart suddenly heavy, “I’m afraid a walk’s not going to be possible.”

“If you’re too busy tonight, then perhaps tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow night won’t be a good time either. Or any night.” He took a deep breath. “I’m terribly sorry, Livia. The wedding officer simply can’t be seen to have an Italian girlfriend.”

He saw her thunderstruck expression. “I should have told you earlier,” he said lamely.

Her foot, he noticed, had started tapping rather dangerously. “Are you ashamed of me?” she demanded.

“It isn’t that. It’s my position—”

The slam of the door closing left him in no doubt what her feelings about his position were.

He pulled the report out of the typewriter and read it through. It was, he realized, utter nonsense. With a sigh he screwed it up into a ball, tossed it at the bin, and started over again.

He hoped that by dinner she might have cooled down, but from the hostile stare she gave him he saw it was not the case. His plate was banged down on the table in front of him, and it seemed to him that he was given a far smaller helping than anyone else. To make matters worse, after dinner she seemed to make a beeline for Eric’s table, where she laughed uproariously at everything he said. After twenty minutes of this, James could bear it no longer. He got up, kicked the table leg savagely for want of anything better to kick and went up to bed.

The next morning he awoke before dawn and went to the market. Going from stall to stall he showed the stallholders a large pile of lire and made some discreet inquiries. Eventually, someone indicated that he might be able to supply what James was after. He was made to wait for half an hour, and then the man came back with a small paper bag.

“Here,” he said, passing it over. “There’s an eighth of a pound in there.”

James opened the bag and checked the contents. The smell, charred and dark and rich, filled his nostrils. The twenty or so coffee beans were like tiny black pearls.

A little farther on he found someone selling freshly baked sfogliatelle—tiny pastries filled with ricotta, candied lemon zest and cinnamon, like the ones which Livia served for breakfast. A large bag of oranges and some fresh goat’s milk, and his shopping expedition was complete.

Taking his purchases back to the apartment, he had just managed to lay the table with a cloth, flowers and china, and to press some juice from the oranges, when Livia emerged, yawning, from her sleeping quarters. After a moment she stopped and sniffed the air suspiciously.

“It’s not Nescafé,” he said. “It’s real.”

Her eyes widened. “Real coffee?”

“I may not be able to cook, but I do know how to make a breakfast.”

“Oh James—that’s wonderful.” Then she remembered she was cross with him. “If a little desperate.”

He began to make the coffee. Livia was instantly at his shoulder, eagerly proffering advice, lest through his incompetence the precious beans be ruined.

“It’s all right,” he said, “I know what I’m doing.”

“Of course,” she said. “Have you warmed the cups? You’ll need to. And how are you grinding the coffee? Not like that, you need to crush the beans more finely. No, let the water cool a little first—” She grabbed the coffee grinder and the beans from him, but she was so excited he couldn’t take offense.

When she had poured them both a tiny cup of dense black liquid, so strong it not only had the consistency of engine oil but also a faint sheen of coffee oil on the surface, they both took a bite of a sfogliatella and drank.

“That is two firsts for me,” she said at last. “The first coffee I’ve had since the start of the war, and the first time anyone has ever made me a meal. Thank you, James.”

“No one ever made you a meal before?”

She shook her head. “I always wanted to do everything myself.”

“One day,” he said, sipping his coffee—she had drunk hers in three ecstatic gulps, he noticed—“I will cook us both dinner. Just for the two of us.”

She took a sudden interest in the bottom of her coffee cup. “So you think you might want to step out with me after all?”

“I want to be with you more than anything else in the world. But, Livia, I’m going to have to be clear about this. I can’t be seen with you in public. I can’t acknowledge you as my girl. I can’t even let the other officers know how I feel about you, because the CO might find out, and then I think I’d get the sack and be transferred back to Africa. I know it’s not ideal, but it’s all I can offer.”

“And, of course, you can’t ever marry me,” she said quietly.

He shook his head.

“Where I come from that’s quite a big thing, to court someone you’ve got no intention of marrying. If my father knew…”

“The war won’t last forever.”

“It’s lasted four years already. Who knows how much longer it will go on for?” She smiled ruefully. “Besides, when the war is over you’ll go home. You’ll have had enough of me by then.”

“I will never have had enough of you.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Well, I’ll think about it.”

And with that he had to be content.

But the cooking lessons, at least, were resumed. James gave Livia much amusement by going out and buying himself a pair of kitchen scales. Thereafter, as he watched her cook, he would cross-question her about the quantities she was cooking with.

“How many aubergines are you using per person?”

A shrug. “One or two. It depends how big they are.”

“On how big the aubergines are?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, stupid, how big the person is.”

“How long do you cook them for?”

Another shrug. “Until they’re done.”

“Well, how much breadcrumb do you use?”

“Enough to fill the aubergines.”

“Livia,” he said, exasperated, “how are you going to teach me to cook if you won’t tell me the amounts?”

“But I don’t know the amounts.”

“There must have been a time when you at least weighed your ingredients.”

“I don’t see how, since my mother didn’t own a pair of scales either.”

He tried a different tack. “Suppose someone gave you a recipe—wouldn’t you want to be able to follow their instructions properly?”

Livia laughed scornfully. “If someone were prepared to give away a recipe, it obviously wouldn’t be much good.”

In one of the many bookshops on the Via Maddaloni, he found an old book of recipes and took it back to show her.

“You see?” he said triumphantly. “Recipes. They do exist.”

Livia turned some of the pages, a frown on her face. “These are very poor,” she announced.

“How do you know if you haven’t tried them?”

“They’re the wrong amounts. And sometimes in the wrong order.”

“But how do you know, if you can’t tell me what the right amounts are?”

She shrugged. “I just do.”

He sighed. “I’ll tell you what. Next time you cook, will you use the scales to measure what you put in, and write it down, just like they do in the book? Then I’ll be able to copy you.”

“If I have to.”

After she had cooked melanzane farcite he found a note scrawled on the back of an army Bureau bulletin. It was heavily stained with oil and onions, and it read:

Aubergines—a few

Tomatoes—twice as many as the eggplants

Oil—q b

Onion—1 or more depending on size

Almonds—q b

Breadcrumbs—q b

“What’s this?” he asked.

She seemed surprised. “It’s the recipe, like you asked me.”

“Livia, it’s a list.”

“There’s a difference?”

“Well, what does this ‘q b’ mean?”

“Quanto basta. Whatever is enough.”

He gave up, and the next day the scales had vanished from the kitchen.

Her preferred way of teaching involved sharing her mother’s favorite kitchen sayings. Livia was quite happy to tell him, for example, that quattr’ omini ci vonnu pre fari ’na bona ’nzalata: un pazzu, un saviu, un avaru, e un sfragaru—it takes four men to make a salad: a madman, a scholar, a miser and a spendthrift.

“Meaning what, exactly?” James asked, mystified.

“Meaning that you need a madman to mix it—so,” she said, shaking the ingredients vigorously together with her fingers, “but a scholar to measure out the salt—one pinch. Then you need a miser for the vinegar.” She added a few tiny drops of vinegar. “But with the oil, you want a spendthrift, because of course you cannot be too generous with good oil.”

He learnt, too, that sparaci e funci svrigògnanu cocu, asparagus and mushrooms, teach a cook humility; that you should favor latti di crapa, ricotta di pecura e tumazzu di vacca, milk from the goat, ricotta from the sheep and cheese from the cow; and that cci voli sorti, cci voli furtuna sinu a lu stissu frìjiri l’ova, it takes both luck and good fortune just to fry eggs. Some of this made sense and some of it did not, but it was all worth it for the pleasure of her company.

Other aspects of her cooking lessons were even more mysterious. When he asked her why she put a cork in the pot whenever she boiled seafood, she muttered something darkly which he could not quite catch. On closer questioning, it turned out that the cork would ward off malocchio, the evil eye. Similarly, to eat cucumbers in August, or melons in October, brought bad luck as well as fever. To spill wine was good luck, but the pieces of a broken mirror had to be carefully gathered up and submerged in running water. Once, he found her counting the seeds in a lemon; when he asked her what she was doing, she told him that she was counting how many children she would have. She had an absolute horror of silverware left uncrossed on an empty plate, and when she bought a lottery ticket from the hunchback who patrolled the municipal gardens every day with a great placard of fluttering tickets hanging around his neck, she stroked his hump for luck. However, she would never buy a ticket, or undertake any other venture requiring good fortune, on a Tuesday or a Friday, since it was well-known that né di venere, né di marte, non si dá principio all’arte—you should not marry, travel, or do something new on those days of the week.

It was all nonsense, but then, he reflected, he himself had never got around to throwing away that piece of bone the priest had given him in the Duomo.

He wanted to talk to her properly about her husband, and he chose his moment carefully, waiting until dinner was over and the other officers were busy with their game of scopa.

“I know I can’t ever replace Enzo,” he said. “And I promise I won’t ever try to.”

“Actually, it isn’t like that,” she said thoughtfully. “‘Replace’…that suggests men are interchangeable, like lightbulbs. But people, I think, are more like recipes.”

“Livia,” he said, mystified, “I really, really want to understand what you’re saying right now. But I don’t.”

She was surprised; to her this was obvious. “When you change a lightbulb, of course you need the same sort of bulb to replace it with. But recipes are the opposite. Remember when we went to the market, and we chose the swordfish? Well, on another day, I might have chosen tuna instead. But they would have ended up as two different dishes, with completely different ingredients. In a tuna recipe, you can’t replace the tuna with swordfish, and vice versa. So if what you have is swordfish, you choose a different recipe. Both good, but different.”

“So Enzo was tuna?” he said, understanding now.

“No, Enzo was swordfish. You’re tuna.”

“Oh,” he said, slightly crestfallen. “Can’t I be swordfish? I don’t like tuna.”

She laughed. “Sometimes, you are just the smallest bit like him. He would have hated being told he was a tuna too. He was a sweet boy,” she said, tears springing to her eyes at the thought of him, “but a bit vain, and not as clever as you are.”

He said nothing, putting his arm around her as she cried for a little while.

“Thank you,” she said, drying her eyes on his sleeve. “You see? I told you you were clever. You let me cry, whereas Enzo would have been furious if he’d seen me crying over someone else.”

In the market, she showed him how to choose oil. “There’s extra vergine, sopraffino vergine, fino vergine and vergine,” she explained.

“And extra virgin is good?”

“Of course. The more virgin the better.” There was just the merest hint of mischief in her voice. “Much sweeter. And you know what? They say that the very first pressing is the sweetest one of all.”

Sometimes as they cooked he would kiss her, and their kisses would be flavored by whatever it was she was cooking with—the astringent echo of a mint leaf, or the slow spreading warmth of oregano. But although he was certain that she enjoyed these embraces, sooner or later she would push him away. “You can’t fry fish in water,” she would mutter enigmatically, or “Lu cunzatu quantu basta, cchiù si conza, cchiù si guasta. Too much seasoning is more than enough.”