The Ice-Cream Makers (26 page)

I didn't know. I didn't remember the names, only the colours of the window shutters and the flowers in the balcony boxes. Red geraniums.

They had left, these families, and never returned. The ice-cream makers who had parlours in the Netherlands or Germany now often stayed there all year round. Some remained open in winter, selling coffee, sandwiches, and soup.

‘That's where Elio Toscani used to live,' my father said after we had pulled into Venas. ‘And Pietro Soravia, over there.' I looked at the houses. The shutters were open, the curtains pulled back. There was life, albeit slow and shuffling. Women growing older, widows falling asleep on the couch. Their children in Deventer, Groningen, Hamburg, Mannheim — in the middle of the day the phone might suddenly ring, waking them from their afternoon sleep.

‘Tito Dall'Asta has passed away as well.'

Tall, jolly Tito. He had taught me to ski and I had been in the same year as his daughter in school.

‘He had a good ice-cream parlour,' my father remarked, ‘but a difficult wife.'

We drove past their house, with laundry hanging on the balcony. There were large white underpants, stockings, tea towels. The women lived longer in Venas — in the whole of Cadore, actually. The men had worked their bodies to the bone. By the time they retired, they were spent.

‘Fausto Olivo didn't live to see winter, either. He died last week. You'll still find flowers on his grave.'

‘Did you go?'

‘Yes, I go to every funeral. You're expected to. People my age have no excuse to stay away. We've got nothing better to do.'

The Land Rover turned into the steep road our house was on. We sped to the top.

Beppi gave a brief chuckle. ‘It's becoming a time-consuming hobby,' he said. ‘The ice-cream makers are dying out.'

The trees were advancing since they were no longer chopped down for use in the kitchen or to heat the houses. The cold, empty houses, with their walls full of cracks.

My mother is in the kitchen. When she hugs me, I feel her bones jutting out. She has lost weight. ‘The sun's out,' she says when we let go of each other, ‘but it's not all that warm.' And while she discusses the weather forecast for the Belluno province and for greater Rotterdam, I notice my father slipping into the hallway, on his way to the basement, to his treasure trove of tools.

‘Is he still working on the heart hammer?' I ask my mother.

‘He's already made three.'

‘Is he planning to send them?'

‘I've no idea what he has in mind. I just hope he's not going to throw them around.'

She picks up the wooden spoon and stirs the sauce on the stove. I smell tomato, bacon, onion, and courgette. It's for the pasta we're about to eat — the table has already been set.

I look at the photos on the cupboards. There is a black-and-white portrait of Luca and me, taken in Alfredo Vissa's photo studio in Pieve di Cadore, not far from the house where Titian was born. The painter spent twelve years in Pieve, before being apprenticed to Giovanni Bellini in Venice and painting saints and doges. Aged fourteen and twelve, we were captured as fat-cheeked boys with neat partings in our hair. We had been to the hairdresser's especially for the photo. I remember the flashlights and the sweet we were given by the photographer, but not whether Luca and I held hands on our way to the studio. It is the only photo with a wavy white border. The other photos are more recent, most of them in colour. One shows our family in front of the ice-cream parlour in Rotterdam. The photo is blurred and the colours have lost their brilliance. You need to look twice to make out the faces, to tell Luca and me apart.

There are photos of Luca's family, too. I look at one of Sophia with her newborn son in her arms, a baby with deep furrows in his forehead. Giuseppe, named after his grandfather and great-great-grandfather. He has their dark eyes too, but his mother's blond hair. People felt compelled to run their hands through it, through those first, soft wisps. Before long it became clear that he also had his mother's long tongue. There's a photo of that too, of Sophia and her son both touching the tips of their noses with their tongues. But that one's not here. His hair has grown noticeably darker over the years. In his most recent portrait he is seventeen and sporting shoulder-length, almost black hair. ‘A terrible hairstyle,' according to Luca. ‘Impractical for an ice-cream maker. Dangerous, and unhygienic to boot.'

My mother tastes the sauce and adds a pinch of salt. Her back is hunched. She may not have touched a
spatola
for years, but her posture suggests she's still leaning over the ice-cream counter.

‘Can you get Beppi?' she asks. ‘The food's ready in ten minutes.'

‘Do I need that long to get him upstairs?'

‘Probably a lot longer. If it's up to him he'll stay down there all day long.'

I walk past the feather headdress and down the stairs to my father's bunker.

He doesn't hear me because he's busy grinding. Golden-white sparks fly off the iron, and the floor is littered with filings and gleaming curls. Not wanting to startle him, I sit down on the bottom step. And so I watch him for a while, the ice-cream maker who wanted to be an inventor. He retired eight years ago. That's when he called it a day in Rotterdam. ‘Or else there'll be casualties,' he told my mother. Enough was enough. Fifty-seven summers.

There was no stopping my mother, but then she was seven years younger than my father. She couldn't abandon Luca. He badly needed her help. Those first few years she joined him when he and Sophia went to Rotterdam in February, leaving Beppi on his own in Venas for eight months, the entire ice-cream season. Every evening my mother phoned him at the stroke of seven and asked how he was doing. ‘Better every day,' was his response.

The truth was that the kitchen counter was stacked full of dirty plates and food-encrusted pans. And instead of washing his clothes, he just bought a new pack of socks and underpants every week. The sheets smelled sour; his pillow was yellow. He hauled machines to the garage and drove over to other black-fingered guys once a week to talk crown drills, saw blades, and sanding discs. The rest of the time he spent either in the basement or watching his one thousand television channels.

I visited him in summer and was shocked by the filth.

‘What are you doing?' my father exclaimed as I opened all the windows.

‘Doesn't the stench get to you?'

‘It doesn't bother me.'

‘Don't you think you should do the dishes?'

‘I haven't got the time.'

He was too busy grinding, drilling, sawing, and sanding in the basement.

I stripped the bed, throwing the sheets and clothes into the washing machine. Then I rinsed all the plates, pans, knives, forks, and glasses; swept and mopped the floors; scrubbed and scoured the walls; and hung up the washing to dry in the warm sunshine.

‘
Now
I could do with the windows open,' my father said. ‘What's that smell?'

‘Detergent. Lavender.'

‘It stinks.'

I'm sure he would have been happy if Luca had cleaned the house. I was the son who couldn't do anything right. And always would be. No matter that I had succeeded Victor Larssen as director of the World Poetry Festival and that in the past year I had been chairman of the jury awarding the most important poetry prize in the Dutch language.

I took him to Ristorante Il Portico in Valle, where he always ate the same pizza: a margherita with
bresaola
and rocket. Accompanied by
una bella bionda
,
of course. He drained his glass in no time and asked the waitress for another. While clearing up at his place, I had come across countless empty beer cans, all dented, as though they had been attacked by a bored schoolboy. On one occasion I had caught him whacking a can with a flat, vertical hand. ‘Hi-yah!' he had said while doing it.

‘Don't you miss Mamma?' I asked.

‘I just talked to her on the phone.'

He cut a slice of pizza. I wondered how much I took after him. Was it his doing that I had never missed a woman, that I had never woken up feeling lovesick?

‘Do you still love her?'

‘Jesus, Giovanni. I'm eating my pizza.'

‘Did you miss her back in the day? When you fell in love, Mamma had to go to Ulm to help her parents in their ice-cream parlour while you were working in Rotterdam. How was that summer?'

‘How do you know that?'

‘Mamma told me.'

He took a bite of his pizza, stuffing the strip of
bresaola
, which was left dangling from his mouth, back in with his fingers.

‘Did you write letters to her? How did you feel back then?'

My father nearly choked on the sliver of dried beef.

‘Did you ever miss her?'

‘Why won't you let me enjoy my pizza? What's gotten into you?'

I don't know why I was so blunt. Perhaps because we had never sat opposite each other in a restaurant with the opportunity for a conversation, just the two of us.

‘Marriage is really complicated,' he said then, ‘but that's something you'll never understand.' It was a sneer, a stab in the back, and for a moment it seemed as though he envied me for this aspect of my life, too. The lonely part. As though he had not only been forced to become an ice-cream maker, but to marry, too. After all, you need a woman in an ice-cream parlour.

We spent the rest of our dinner gazing at the atrocious frescoes the owner had applied to the walls of his restaurant. Beppi didn't want an espresso. He ordered another beer.

‘I'm leaving tomorrow afternoon,' I said.

There was no reaction, just a brief smile after a few seconds. That was all.

Back at the car, we nearly had an argument because he insisted on driving.

‘You've had too much to drink.'

‘They rarely stop anyone,' my father countered. ‘Besides, it's only a short distance.'

‘I'd like to go over to Pieve.'

‘Pieve? Why do you want to go there?'

‘I'd like an ice-cream.'

‘You're bonkers.'

‘I fancy it.'

‘I fancy another beer.'

‘Then we'll go to the ice-cream parlour first and to Bar Posta afterwards.'

Like a miffed child, he sat down in the passenger seat. I didn't hear another word from him. Until we entered Pieve. ‘I'll wait outside,' he said then.

I thought he was kidding, but once we had parked the car and walked over to the ice-cream parlour, he waited at the corner, some twenty metres from the display counter.

Gelateria al Centro had been in Pieve for almost fifteen years. The owners used to run a parlour in Tilburg, but they no longer wanted to spend eight months away from home every year. It took some getting used to, an ice-cream parlour in Cadore. ‘It's like having a restaurant in a stable,' someone had remarked in Bar Posta. And although it had been harder in recent years because the villages were getting quieter, the owners managed to earn a crust. They had outstanding sorbets, made of fruits from the mountains. Strawberries growing at an altitude of 1,736 metres made for delicious strawberry sorbet.

With a cup containing two scoops of raspberry sorbet in my hands, I walked over to my father.

‘Go away!' he yelled, when I was still a few metres away.

‘Surely I can come and stand next to you?'

‘Stay away from me.'

‘I'm your son.'

‘I don't want you to stand next to me with that ice.'

‘It won't explode.'

That didn't get a laugh.

Thinking he was being childish, I walked over to him. But Beppi quickly took a couple of steps back.

‘Wouldn't you like a taste?'

‘Over my dead body!'

‘Fine,' I said. ‘I'll eat it here.' I sat down on a low wall and brought the plastic spoon to my mouth. It was a balmy evening. The windows of some houses were open, and children ran through the narrow streets. The ice-cream was refreshing and sweet. The raspberries and strawberries were said to have been picked by women in their underwear. I had never seen them in the fields, crouched down, in the burning midday sun. More likely than not it was an ice-cream makers' tall tale, like so many others. But those who believed it enjoyed their ice-cream even more.

I let the last bite melt on my tongue and tried to savour the moment. My father stood with his back to me and to the ice-cream parlour, staring at the asphalt. He looked as if he was staring into an abyss.

Back in the car I wanted to put an arm around him. No big deal. Just a hug of sorts. But my father shot up in his chair, practically hitting the roof of the Land Rover.

‘What are you doing?' he exclaimed. ‘Get your sticky fingers off me!'

Finally, the grinder is switched off. My father runs his calloused thumb along the edge of the iron heart.