The Ice-Cream Makers (20 page)

‘I work for a publisher,' I stammered. ‘I already have a job.'

‘Robert Berendsen would understand your choice. He'd be happy for you.'

I looked over to Sophia again. She continued to return my gaze, her mouth a little open, the lips parted slightly.

‘Would you like the job?'

‘Of course,' I replied. ‘Of course I want to be an editor of the finest poetry festival in the world.'

I thought of Heiman, of the lighthouse of Alexandria to which he used to compare the World Poetry Festival. He had piloted me to this harbour; now it was time to go ashore.

‘In that case, we've got something to celebrate,' Larssen said. ‘Do they have champagne here?'

I shook my head. The most festive dish on the menu was the Coupe Gondola with fruit, ice-cream, and whipped cream. But if I were to order that, my brother was sure to kill me. What was I thinking? Sit outside in twenty-eight degrees and order a large coupe to boot! As if he didn't have enough work to do!

I tried to establish eye contact with Luca, but he avoided my gaze. He looked tired, an ice-cream maker in summer. Six more weeks, the tail end of September and October, and they would head back to Venas. And then he would finally get to sit in an easy chair, watch television, nap after lunch, and in the evening, after popping into Bar Posta, make a baby.
Un piccolo gelataio
who would one day have a calloused thumb, like his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather before him. That was the order of things. And this new offshoot of the Talamini family tree would one day take over the ice-cream parlour and beget yet another child who would churn ice-cream.

This winter I was due to travel to Italy, too. In December Luca and Sophia would be getting married in the new San Marco church. He hadn't yet asked me to be his witness, but he was going to, according to my mother.

‘Let's go to the Veerhaven and have a drink over there,' Larssen suggested. He settled the bill with my father. A note was handed over, coins were given back. No words were spoken. The silence was as bad as a snide remark.

While Larssen retrieved his dog from the office, I waited outside on the footpath and observed the ice-cream parlour. Our seats had already been taken by other people. My brother took their order with a friendly smile. Children were running around in high spirits. A breeze had got up and the edge of the awning was flapping. Thunder was imminent. My father retreated behind the espresso machine.

The door to the office opened. Larssen came out first, the pug traipsing after him. ‘Hardy fancies a drink too,' he said.

I saw my mother waving at me with her free hand, the one without a
spatola
. Sophia waved too, over the heads of the children, the fathers, the mothers, the tourists, the senior citizens, the lovers, the lonely, the well-to-do, the skint — all those wanting an ice-cream on this muggy day.

I would see them again the following day. It had rained in the night, a summer thunderstorm. The footpaths were dotted with large puddles, but the asphalt was already drying. I was with a woman I had met the night before. Kitty. She worked for a communications agency downtown and had woken me at seven in the morning because that's when she got up during the week.

‘Oh look, it's one of our regulars,' my father said as he approached our table.

I was asking for trouble, of course, but Kitty had insisted on going for a cappuccino at Venezia. I had bumped into her in the café in the harbour where Larssen and I had gone to drink a glass of champagne. At some point both of us got talking to other people: he to an architect friend, me to an unknown woman whose bare back was sunburnt. If you pressed it, your hand briefly left a white mark.

I had interrogated her, and she me, in the unashamedly curious way of people who have just met. Heiman told me once that Isaak Babel wanted to know everything about beautiful women. He even asked to look in their handbags. ‘Did Babel write poetry?' I asked, surprised.

‘No,' Heiman answered. ‘But he loved a lot of women.'

I found out that Kitty had been the mistress of a plastic surgeon for almost a year, she that I came from a family of ice-cream makers.

‘Is that your brother?' she asked after a sip of her cappuccino. I looked up from my espresso and spotted Luca in the ice-cream parlour with tubs of ice in both hands. My mother took them from him. Sophia was probably upstairs. It was early and not all that warm yet. The first ice-cream of the day had yet to be sold.

‘He looks a lot like you,' Kitty noted. ‘He's got the same build and the same posture.'

‘I'm more than an inch taller.'

‘He's got the same nose, too.'

‘Other than that we're completely different.'

‘Your skin's a bit darker, I grant you that,' Kitty said. ‘You've spent more time in the sun.'

‘My brother works the whole summer.'

‘He's more muscular, too.'

Luca came out, not looking at me but at Kitty's legs. She was wearing a short skirt and pale blue lace knickers underneath, but I was hoping those weren't visible.

‘You've got the same ears,' Kitty said.

‘Now you're teasing me.'

‘Such cute little ears.'

She took another sip of her cappuccino.

‘And I bet he's got the same buttocks too, but to be sure of that he'd have to turn round and show us his other side.'

‘Shall I ask him to?'

She turned towards me and kissed me on the mouth. I could taste the milky cappuccino on her lips. ‘But I suspect he doesn't have your beautiful long lashes,' she whispered.

Sophia had come down. From behind the ice-cream she looked at Kitty's legs, just as my brother had done. Judging by the look on her face I was all but sure that she could tell what colour the lace was. Then our eyes met, but this time I got no smile, no nod, no wave.

‘Who's she?' Kitty asked.

‘My brother's fiancé. They're getting married in winter.'

‘What a beautiful girl.'

Sophia turned her back on us.

‘Is she Italian?'

‘Yes, she's from Modena. She was thirteen when she moved to our village.'

‘Tell me more.'

‘What do you want to know?'

‘Didn't you fall in love with her?'

‘She's my brother's future wife.'

‘Not in those days.'

Luca had gone back in. And as he made his way to the kitchen I suddenly felt a stab of longing, nostalgia for the ice-cream machines. I couldn't help it. It was there, the wish to be beside him in the kitchen right now. To prepare fruit, grind nuts, fill the cylinder of the Cattabriga. To listen to the scraper blade together.

‘Yes, even in those days,' I replied.

Kitty looked at Sophia, at the blonde braid between her shoulders. ‘Do you know how the plastic surgeon's wife found out?' she asked then.

‘Did she catch you in the act?'

‘No, that would have been painful.' She briefly touched her back, which was still sunburnt. ‘His wife could tell just by looking at him. That's what she said to him, one morning, over breakfast. Nothing had triggered it. She could tell simply by looking at him.'

‘Would you like to order anything else?' It was my father, standing behind us. He wasn't feeling the new day in his legs yet. The resentment was there, but it wasn't that acute yet. ‘Maybe you'd like another cup of coffee?'

‘I kind of fancy an ice-cream, actually,' Kitty said. ‘Shall we share a cup?'

‘One cup for the two of you?' my father said. ‘How many flavours?'

‘You decide.' Kitty smiled at me. She had a small mouth with thin but supple lips.

‘What would you like?' Beppi said. He smiled at me as well. He took pleasure in his role. He had all the time in the world and didn't require me to play along. I
was
a customer. I was sitting outside their parlour, after all.

‘Three flavours,' I replied.

‘And which will they be?'

There was no way back now. ‘Vanilla, mango, and blueberry,' I said, ordering the first ice-cream of the day.

My Brother's Wedding and My Father's Songbird

The wedding in Venas took place on a blue day. The sun had risen above the mountains in the morning, setting fire to the sky. The fields were blanketed in a thick layer of snow, covering even the needles of the larch trees, but the roads were clear. My father had come to pick me up from the station in Dobbiaco. I had travelled from New Delhi, where I had visited a poetry festival with Victor Larssen. We had spent most of the time in a minivan. Although poetry was read in locations across the city, there wasn't much of an audience. Larssen had explained to me that the festival aimed to bring poets together so they could translate one another's work. ‘The audience comes second,' he had said. In my hotel room, with its view of Connaught Place, a rat had spent all night trying to find a way out through the air-conditioning unit. I hadn't slept a wink.

My father looked well: relaxed and in high spirits, an ice-cream maker in winter.

‘How was your trip?' he asked as we drove out of Dobbiaco. He had come in the white Land Rover. When you accelerated, the engine growled, a sound my father loved. He had bought the four-by-four for the mountains. For the longer distances, such as the annual drive to Rotterdam and back, he had a green, virtually silent Mercedes.

‘Long,' I replied. I had flown from Delhi to Rome, where I had boarded the night train to Verona before continuing my journey via Bolzano and Fortezza. I felt as if part of me had yet to arrive.

‘Here you go,' my father said. ‘Your mother made you a
piadina
.'

I unwrapped the aluminium foil and took a bite, tasting the prosciutto and stracchino. It was better warm, but it would do for now. I couldn't get it down my throat fast enough.

‘Luca is dead nervous,' my father said. ‘I can't remember finding my wedding day that daunting. Your mother had to help him with his cufflinks.' He laughed while he stepped on the gas. ‘Maybe he's scared she'll say no!'

The engine growled like a bear as we zipped through the white winter landscape. I clung to the grab handle whenever we tilted in a hairpin turn. Every now and then my eyes fell shut, but I would jolt awake when my head hit the car door.

As we drove down the main street of Cortina d'Ampezzo, my father started talking again. ‘I'm curious to see if the church will be full,' he said. ‘When Valentino and Anna got married, some people had to stand.' He was referring to the wedding of his brother's son. ‘Practically the entire village turned out.' Deep down my father was nervous, too.

‘I wouldn't mind a drink,' he said as we approached Venas, ‘but I promised to head straight home. Your mother is worried we'll be late. No surprises there.' Still, he slowed down when we spied a bar by the side of the road.

‘No, Pappa,' I admonished him. ‘We have to get there on time.'

‘We've got plenty of time.'

‘No.'

‘One beer,' he pleaded. ‘
Una bella bionda
.'

‘Beppi!'

‘His mother's son,' my father muttered and stepped on the gas. ‘There goes my
bionda
, there she goes.'

In winter he liked to drink a beer in the morning, something nearly all ice-cream makers did. But most of them didn't know when to stop. After retirement, their noses tended to get redder and redder. The empty days, the deserted streets — that's what did for them.

We drove past Sophia's parents' big house. Lights were on in every single room. Her father was sitting in the living room, I could see, but I couldn't see his wife and daughter. Maybe they were in the bathroom at the back of the house. I thought of Sophia's long, blonde hair, the hair I had never got to brush.

Smoke billowed out of the chimney of our house, the grey dissolving in the cold blue sky. My father parked the Land Rover next to the Mercedes. A cement mixer blocked the entrance to the garage. ‘It's new,' he said proudly.

‘I thought you already owned a cement mixer?'

‘A different kind. This one's got a greater volume and it's orange.'

My father would never, ever make cement or mortar. Not in this life, anyway.

My mother hugged me and told me how pleased she was with the beautiful weather. She was beaming.

‘Come,' she said, ‘freshen up and get changed. We'll talk when we're in church.'

Just then Luca emerged from the bathroom, wearing a brand-new suit. His hair was slicked back, and it shone like ebony. In order to squeeze past each other in the narrow corridor, we both had to do a quarter turn, and so it happened that for a brief moment we were standing with our backs against the wall, a tiny space between our bellies and noses. I noticed the bags under his eyes, and presumably he saw mine.