The Ice-Cream Makers (23 page)

‘I want sprinkles,' I heard a little girl say to Sophia.

‘And what flavour would you like?'

‘Sprinkles.'

‘No, the flavour,' her mother prompted her. ‘You need to tell her the flavour.'

The little girl thought long and hard before answering, ‘I can't remember.'

All I could see was her back, the butterfly bows in the blonde, almost shoulder-length plaits. I couldn't see her small greedy mouth, her golden eyebrows, her deep-blue or grey-green eyes.

‘Vanilla?' the mother said to her daughter.

‘Oh, yes, vanilla with sprinkles,' she exclaimed in delight.

But Sophia's left hand didn't stir to pick up a cone. Her right hand didn't reach for the ice-cream with the
spatola
. Nobody in the queue noticed — they were all discussing the ice-cream, the flavours they were going for — but I saw my mother putting her hand on Sophia's shoulder.

‘And for me, a cup with pineapple-grapefruit and fromage frais with prunes,' the mother said. ‘I'm really curious to see what it's like.'

The news even made it as far as Venas di Cadore. Serafino Dall'Asta had written a piece in
L'Amico del Popolo
, the local paper. The journalist had phoned Luca and asked him whether he had come up with all the flavours himself. My brother told him that he spent hours on end experimenting with combinations, but that he liked to take inspiration from customers as well. Just as once upon a time people brought fruits to my great-grandfather, they now came up with suggestions for new flavours. Cherry and chocolate, banana and coconut, blackberry and vanilla.

And just like my great-grandfather, Luca kept creating new ice-cream varieties. He introduced a flavour of the week and a board advertising special combinations. A second display was built into the counter for yet more tubs. And so the summer went by, with long queues and bare legs on the terrace, with gleeful noises and beaming faces around midnight.

Together with Victor Larssen I travelled to poetry festivals across Europe and, at the end of July, as fat raindrops hissed on the runway, to Medellín for the first time. The festival's opening night took place in a theatre hewn from rocks halfway up Mount Nutibara. We drove there in large buses, travelling across one of South America's biggest cities. Cars, scooters, and minivans were everywhere. Larssen told me that not so long ago Medellín was the most criminal city in the world. People were afraid to leave their homes. The newspapers were full of political assassinations; the streets were the scene of massacres. There were fatalities every single day, most of the victims young and anonymous, but the puddles of blood also spread around gang leaders, FARC members, and senior military figures. ‘The festival is a response to the evil,' Larssen said. ‘It was set up by the poets and editors of the Latin American poetry magazine
Prometeo
. They wanted to offer an alternative to the corruption, the violence, the brutal murders in broad daylight, and they've pulled it off. What was once South America's capital of crime has now become the city with the world's biggest poetry festival.'

I looked at the mountain range in front of us. Medellín was situated in a bowl, at the bottom of a basin. The city was surrounded by mountains, and one of those was Mount Nutibara. As the road became steeper, the engine of the bus struggled with the gears at times. We drove through a jungle, flanked by trees with dark green leaves. The scratching sound of insects and the occasional loud screech of a bird came in through the open windows.

On the bus were poets from Italy, Somalia, Mexico, Canada, Norway. A total of seventy poets would be reading on opening night. I had heard stories about the thousands of visitors, the seats hewn from rock, the applause that rose up to heaven. ‘You won't believe your eyes,' Robert Berendsen had said.

The bus came to a halt on a widened verge, the kind of spot where a couple of years back corpses might have been thrown out of a car. I heard some poets wonder whether we were in the right place. Surely this couldn't be it? The Parnassus: a ghastly place in the forest.

One after the other, we got out and started going down a steep stone staircase. The oldest poets crept down slowly, like beetles, their younger colleagues hot on their heels. Every now and then the procession halted and a poet would stare down, but the theatre was nowhere to be seen. At the bottom of the staircase was a small hut you had to walk around. And that's when you saw it: a gigantic amphitheatre with ascending stone rows, an arena in the jungle. Here and there people were already seated, as the audience poured in via gates on either side.

‘It's possible to approach the theatre from below,' I heard Larssen say above me. ‘There's a car park at the foot of the mountain from where you take a very steep staircase up. But this is the best way, with the theatre suddenly looming up ahead.' Like a square in Rome, after navigating numerous narrow alleyways — unexpected and grandiose.

I walked further down until I reached the stage. It was around forty metres wide and covered by a roof. Enormous rows of speakers were suspended from grids on either side. Although not on yet, the spotlights were trained on some seventy white plastic bucket seats on stage. We had the same chairs on Venezia's terrace. My father put them out every morning and stacked them up again at night. There were two lecterns with a microphone each: one for the poet, one for the translator.

Seats had been reserved for us in the front row, but Larssen wanted to sit higher up, among the general audience. At other festivals, too, he rarely sat in the seats with the white ‘reserved' slips. At the World Poetry Festival he always stood to the side of the stands because he was too nervous to sit down.

The stone rows of the theatre filled up. The festival was to open at seven o'clock, but a full thirty minutes prior to the official start all the seats were occupied. You could see men and women climbing trees and sitting on branches, and in a field higher up, a clearing in the forest, there were people too.

The scale of it, the crowds: it all felt like a concert. They were ordinary city folk — labourers, bus drivers, market traders, as well as families with children. They had brought food (deep-fried
empanadas
with chorizo and grilled corn on the cob) and beverages (Coca-Cola, Águila beer, cheap whisky). The sky was clear. We would have no rain tonight, unlike that time when Robert Berendsen was here and everybody simply stayed put under a poncho or an umbrella, listening to poetry.

Meanwhile all the poets had taken their seats on stage. I spotted Lars Gustafsson and Breyten Breytenbach, as well as poets I didn't recognise.

As they do at concerts, the audience sensed that the programme was about to begin. People wolf-whistled and clapped their hands. Children stood up and joined in. ‘Not long now,' Larssen said. It was like Cadore before it snowed — when the snow was in the air and the people could smell it. Everybody knew it could be any moment now.

No lights came on. In fact, they wouldn't be switched on until several hours later, when the sky had turned a deep blue. The festival director walked on and welcomed the audience and the poets. He clenched his fist and whipped up the crowd. It sounded as if he was chanting battle cries. ‘This is nothing,' Larssen said. ‘Wait till he starts speechifying.'

Every poet read ten poems, with each poem followed by the Spanish translation. Again and again, a man or a woman got up from one of the white chairs and walked to the front, to the microphone. Seven hundred poems in a single night. It was a marathon session, but the poets did everything in their power to retain the audience's attention. They would start with a declaration of love to Medellín, for example, or bow deeply to the audience. ‘This is the most beautiful day of my life,' a poet from the Congo said. The applause was a tsunami crashing from the top row down.

At one o'clock in the morning we were still listening to poems, with frequent revolutionary speeches from the festival director thrown in. He roared into the microphone that poetry could save humankind from capitalism and imperialism. The people whooped and clapped under the stars. And then another poet would rise to his feet and read his work to more than ten thousand listeners. I forgot all about the poetry readings in badly lit library rooms. I forgot the presentations drowned out by noise in pubs and cafés. I forgot the dismal literary afternoons where people felt obliged to clap after each poem, sometimes even when the poet merely paused between stanzas. I tilted my head and tried to make out a falling star, while poetry poured into my ears. This is what it must have been like to stand atop the Parnassus and be enchanted by poetry. This is what it must be all about.

After the opening night, Medellín itself was taken over. For eight days, the poets were driven around the city of millions in minivans. Huge audiences turned up wherever they were: in theatres, in the open air, at the university. Larssen and I immersed ourselves in this city of poetry only to resurface a week later in Parque Lleras, where we came up for air and drank a glass of ice-cold Águila.

Meanwhile, in Rotterdam, my brother created ever more unusual flavours: herring ice-cream; rose ice-cream; ice-cream made of fennel, with pear and basil notes. Very rarely was there a flavour that didn't work out, or a result that wasn't quite what he had in mind. An Italian man had asked Luca if he could make ice-cream from
prosciutto crudo
, dry-cured ham. Luca set to work, juggling ingredients and listening to the sound of the scraper blade. A quick glance told him that the ice-cream had come out right, but when he took a bite the flavour disgusted him. It was revolting. Ham ice-cream simply didn't work. Even the most committed carnivore wouldn't like it.

Ice-cream made of alcoholic beverages was difficult to prepare, too. Luca had made ice with Moscato d'Asti, a dessert wine, and he was experimenting with the combination of prosecco and red currant. He wasn't happy with the result, and the tubs never made it into the display. But Luca refused to give up. He kept tinkering with the recipe; he kept retreating into the kitchen.

This experimentation went on for two more years — two short winters and two long ice-cream maker's summers; two years during which Sophia's hair became duller and duller and my father's songbird chirped louder and louder; two years during which I flew around the globe from festival to festival and I felt like a stranger in my own apartment. Two years chock-full of poetry and ice-cream, and then my brother started talking to me again. He took me aside in the kitchen. I noticed that he had a new system for the dry ingredients, and that the freezer had been replaced, too. He had bought a third ice-cream machine, a smaller, horizontal model. The white tiles on the wall were pristine; the worktop gleamed like never before. Or was it new, too? As we hadn't spoken in years, the silence had become familiar, however uncomfortable and painful it was.

Two years on top of ten years. That's how long he had been silent.

‘You've got to help me,' he said then, and looked at me with the same dark eyes I had. ‘You've got to get Sophia pregnant.'

Jacuzzis and Ironing Boards

Hotel receptions are almost always staffed by women, while the night porter is usually a man in his late forties. Hotel corridors are like streets, with identical doors on either side. The light is diffuse, the walls matte, and the carpet muffles all sound: heels, rattling wheelie suitcases, voices late at night. Sometimes, somewhere halfway down, there is a random shoe-polishing machine.

The bigger hotel chains all have keycards for their rooms, but in smaller establishments the receptionist will hand the guest a key on a ring with the room number. In Ljubljana, in Hotel Center, the keyring came in the shape of a fluorescent gnome; at the Hotel Royal in Tetovo, the key was attached to a heavy bullet. (‘Do not lose key,' were the receptionist's only words when I checked in at Tetovo.) There's a greater risk of the room door not opening with keycards than with keys. They can be inserted in four different ways, and even when you get it right the unlocking mechanism may refuse to comply and you have no choice but to return to reception.

Whether two, three, four, or five stars, the room will contain a chair, a desk, a lamp, and a television. There's usually a window with curtains on a rail and a bed flanked by two cabinets. The drawer of the one on the left often has a bible. In Oslo, in Hotel Rica, I also found an opened packet of condoms. In Medellín, they were actually lying on top of the bedside table, along with a packet of Lucky Strike and a strip of paracetamol. In Brisbane, a shiny green apple awaited me; in Edmonton, a box of mints.

On the desk there'll be a folder with information about the hotel, the restaurant menu, a tourist leaflet, or a map of the city, as well as two sheets of writing paper and two envelopes. There will be a tray with a kettle. The welcome note on top of the television will be in two languages, sometimes even three. The Metropole Hotel in Brussels has the message in nine languages.

There's a safe in the wardrobe; the ironing board either folds out or leans against the wall. The larger wardrobe will have clotheshangers — a single plastic one at the Van der Valk Hotel in Maastricht, twenty-four wooden hangers at Grand Hotel Karel V in Utrecht. An extra blanket lies on the bottom shelf.

In the bathroom you will find two small glasses beside the wash basin, a shoe-polish sponge and a shower cap in separate bags, a small guest soap and a shampoo and a shower gel, or a shampoo and shower gel in one. The hairdryer is in a drawer. And there will usually be a sewing kit, matches, and a ballpoint pen with the hotel logo somewhere.