Milan again. The kind of trattoria that doesn’t need a sign, because everyone already knows where it is. Ten tables, most of them full, all of them loud in that comfortable Italian way where the shouting means affection, not argument. I get the chair by the window. The owner, an older man with forearms like rope, pulls it out for me before I ask.
The risotto arrives the color of saffron and old brass, in a bowl that has clearly survived more dinners than I have years. Steam first, then the smell: butter, stock, something faintly of the sea though we are nowhere near it. He tells me, almost in passing, that my father used to sit in this exact chair. Decades ago. Same window, probably the same draft. I ask if he remembers what my father ordered. He shrugs like the question is beside the point. *Il risotto, ovviamente.* Of course the risotto.
I take one photo before I eat. Just one. The camera doesn’t need more than that, and neither do I. Some rooms want to be looked at. Others just want you to sit down and stop performing for a while. This is the second kind. Outside the window, a woman argues cheerfully with a delivery man about parking. Inside, a fork against ceramic, the low hum of a football match on a television nobody is watching.
I think about how many chairs a person can sit in without ever really landing in one. I’ve had rooms in eleven cities this year. None of them held a memory before I arrived. This one did, and it wasn’t even mine, not directly. It was my father’s, borrowed forward through time and handed to me with a bowl of rice. Funny how a place can remember you before you were born.
The rice is perfect. Slightly resistant at the center, the way it should be, the way nonna would have complained about if it weren’t. I eat slowly, not because I’m trying to be mindful about it, but because rushing here would feel rude, like talking through a film’s best scene. Halfway through the bowl I understand the caption I’ll never quite get right for this: that some tables hold more than dinner, they hold whoever sat there before you, quietly, in the wood grain and the water rings.
I leave a little rice at the bottom. Not on purpose. Some things you just don’t want to finish.
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