The Ice-Cream Makers (3 page)

‘We can travel through the mountains,' Enrico said. A hundred years ago men had managed to traverse the clouds in a hot-air balloon. This was just as magnificent. Not over the mountain but straight through — through the impenetrable base, the widest and densest part.

Giuseppe had to swallow his questions. Had Enrico been on that train? How long did the journey through the tunnel take? Could you see the light at the other end? The others remained expressionless; only his father winked at him. Giuseppe briefly yielded to the cadence of the coach, dreaming with eyes open of the Gotthard Tunnel, whizzing through it like a comet through the dark, infinite universe.

In Venas di Cadore, meanwhile, Maria Grazia stood in front of the window, looking out. She wanted to flee the house and lie in the grass, but the farmers had just mowed their land. Her breasts hurt. She'd seen men looking in the street, their gaze latching onto her body. At home, in her room, she sometimes held her breasts for hours. Her hips, too, had grown, and they hurt almost as much. She was becoming a woman and she needed a man, a man to hold her.

The stagecoach with the two jet-black horses climbed the mountain. It was a long, winding road. Giuseppe had no idea where they were, but judged by the mood that they must be approaching their destination. Enrico Zangrando rolled up his white sleeves. The others followed suit. They picked up the pickaxes and the shovels. All sat up straight.

They came to a halt by a railway track. On it stood a train with eight carriages, their large sliding doors open. Giuseppe jumped out of the coach. He looked around. They were in between two mountain ridges. The sun was nowhere to be seen, and wouldn't rise above the slope until late in the afternoon. But there was snow as far as the eye could see, at least half a metre high. Underneath it, water trickled and flowed down to the valley. Ice-cold water. Men waded into it up to their knees, staying in until their bones hurt because it was said to be good for one's circulation.

It was frozen snow, and they were supposed to fill the carriages with it. Giuseppe couldn't believe his eyes. They raked the snow with their pickaxes, moving it down to the track, the way farmers gather grass. The sizable chunks collected grit and mud, but that didn't matter.

Every now and then, Giuseppe leaned briefly on the handle of his pickaxe to look at the other men. The metalsmith was sweating and steaming; Giuseppe could see the vapour coming off his bare arms, his glistening and incredibly muscular arms. The other men, too, were shrouded in vapour. He was afraid to move, wary of disturbing the scene: the workers with their black hands in the blinding snow, the carriages filling up. He was scared it would all disappear the moment he stirred, like a dream upon waking.

Enrico called out his name and asked if he was fantasising about girls. The other men laughed heartily, his father included.

After two hours they took a break. Three carriages were full; their sliding doors had been shut. They rested on the trunk of a felled larch. A stone bottle was passed around, but Giuseppe wasn't thirsty. More than once he'd dug a hole in the snow and lifted a handful up to his mouth. Every time, his fingers had tingled with cold for minutes.

At first nobody had heard him, because he'd only whispered his question. But when he finally plucked up the courage to repeat it out loud — why were they shovelling snow into carriages? — everybody looked at him. Giuseppe was young and he was curious, and not just about the usual things. He suspected there might be an entire world of which he knew nothing, a brilliant light at the end of the tunnel.

‘We're harvesting,' his father said. ‘We're bringing in the snow.'

The word ‘harvest' made him think of potatoes, beets, and apples. Not of snow in the mountains. Giuseppe looked at the carriages with the closed doors. He was none the wiser.

Enrico took over. ‘It's turned into ice,' he said.

‘Ice?'

‘Not the ice you're familiar with, the kind you can walk and skate on.'

‘There's a different ice?'

‘Different flavours. Strawberry, vanilla, mocha. It's sold in the cities and tastes even better than a woman.'

It felt as if a light was beamed into his head, straight into his brain.

‘I've eaten ice in Vienna made of oranges from Spain.'

‘Impossible,' Antonio Zardus said resolutely, his voice dark and deep.

Enrico ignored it. ‘They were selling it in the street, out of a cart with copper vats.'

Giuseppe immediately hungered for the ice described by Enrico Zangrando the way other people fall in love, in an unforgettable fever. Years later, he could still recall the exchange word for word.

‘You eat it with a small spoon and it melts in your mouth.'

He tried to imagine it, a spoonful of strawberries melting on his tongue, but it was beyond his imagination. It was too big a step, from the frozen, dirty snow to the enchanting, glorious ice. As a child he'd tasted the snow that had fallen overnight, the way all children do, full of anticipation. It was like water, but impure and metallic — the universal disappointment of the taste of snow. He had been misled by the still splendour on the roads and fields. He also remembered how his younger brother, when he was still only two and had no memory of the previous year's snow, had looked outside and said, ‘I want to stroke it.' As though it were a coat of fur protecting the world from the cold.

Enrico told them about the process, the various procedures. It was like alchemy. Snow was broken up with a small hammer and put inside a wooden barrel, after which salt was added to lower the melting point. The cylinder of the mechanical ice-cream machine was placed inside the barrel with the ice and salt, and then the ice-cream maker operated the hand wheel and scraped the substance around the cold wall of the cylinder. Churn, churn, churn. The first ice that formed along the surface was brittle. Air came into it; the volume increased. Churn, churn. The colour turned gradually lighter. Pink strawberry ice-cream, greyish-green pistachio ice-cream, cinnamon-coloured chocolate ice-cream. Churn.

‘Until it's firm and thick and delicious.'

It was like the story you're told about love, about its consummation. It can be described in minute detail, but it will never be as good as it is in real life.

‘Come,' the metalsmith said. ‘Let's get on with it.'

One by one they got up again, until only Giuseppe remained seated. He felt as though he'd been churned too, the way more than a hundred years later his descendant and namesake would be spinning along with Betty Heidler's iron hammer. He sat on the tree trunk, as if he had been overcome by desire.

His father pulled him to his feet. ‘Back to work, my boy,' he said encouragingly. ‘I'll help you.' A moment later Giuseppe could hear him start to whistle a folk song.

Giuseppe wasn't tired. He was young and strong — if perhaps not as strong as Antonio Zardus, who was said to be able to bend coins. But he felt stunned, intoxicated by the stories and sweet flavours in the copper vats of the ice-cream cart in Vienna. His imagination flapped its wings, trying to get clear of the snow, to move beyond the mountains. Perhaps he'd have managed had he known what a woman tasted like. (In that case, he might have imagined something even better.) Now he saw what he already knew: that beyond the mountains lay yet more mountains.

What he didn't know, and nor did the other men — not even Enrico Zangrando — was that they were part of a greater whole. In countless places around the world, the harvest of the cold months was being brought in. In Boston, Frederic Tudor, the son of a well-known judge, had built up an ice-cream empire. At the tender age of twenty-three, this great adventurer had bought his first ship to transport ice to the Caribbean island of Martinique. The blocks of ice came from the pond on his father's estate. Everybody told him he was insane. The newspapers mocked his venture. Although a substantial amount melted during the three-week journey, Frederic Tudor managed to sell the remaining Massachusetts ice to the islanders. Imagine their faces, the look in their eyes. Disbelief, enchantment. Transparent blocks unloaded from the hold of a ship that had sailed 2,400 kilometres. The year was 1806.

His loss amounted to thousands of dollars.

The following year, when Frederic Tudor sailed to Havana with a frozen lake in the hull of his ship, he racked up huge debts, too — as you'd expect from an adventurer. On his return he was thrown into prison, and the next time he set sail the sheriffs escorted him to the dockyard. There in the water was his ship, which bore the bold name of
Trident
.

Tudor experimented with different insulation materials for his ships: hay, wood chips, sawdust, and the chaff of rice. But the breakthrough for his ice company came with the invention of the ice plough. Until then, the blocks had been cut from the frozen New England waters by hand. Now, with the help of horses, they moved on to mass production. The dark, graceful animals were harnessed to a plough with a metal saw. One man led the horse, another steered the plough. This resulted in a grid of perfect cubes, which were then lifted out of the water. Special tools were invented, and ice houses sprang up alongside riverbanks as well as in the ports of far-flung countries. Thousands of men found employment in the winter months, wielding saws and hatchets on lakes that had transformed into immense chessboards.

In 1833 the
Tuscany
, another of Tudor's ships, sailed from Boston to Calcutta with 180 tons of ice in its belly. The three-master travelled for four months until, in September, it reached the Bay of Bengal and proceeded up the holy Ganges River. News of the approaching ice ship spread among the local population, with many thinking it was a hoax. It had been over 30 degrees Celsius in the shade for months. But upon arrival in the port of Calcutta it turned out that 100 tons were still intact: crystal-clear ice with a bluish tinge.

It marked the beginning of a titanic transport of New England's frozen water to India. An ice house of white stone and double walls was erected in Calcutta, which was to become the most lucrative destination of the Tudor Ice Company. The daredevil who'd been laughed at and who'd spent two years of his life behind bars became fabulously rich and earned himself the nickname The Ice King of the World. He sailed to Brazil, Australia, and China.

Other companies also entered the market, including The Knickerbocker Ice Company of New York and The Philadelphia Ice Company. Railways were built to speed up transport, with steam trains criss-crossing the country. The locomotive was fed with fiery coal; the cargo inside the carriages was transparent and cold.

A flourishing trade in ice developed between Norway and England. Men in black caps and hats used tongs to fish enormous blocks of ice out of the vast lakes. These slid down long wooden tracks and into the holds of ships putting in at London and other British ports. It enabled Carlo Gatti, an Italian Swiss national, to open up a number of stalls in the capital. He had tried his luck with the sale of chestnuts and waffles before deciding to make ice-cream. He started on the street with a few carts, but soon relocated to the busy Hungerford Market. There he sold ice-cream in shells for a penny apiece. Later the shells were replaced by small glasses, which became known popularly as ‘penny licks'. Until then, ice-cream had been a treat reserved for the rich. Carlo Gatti was the man who brought the frozen delicacy within reach of the masses. By doing so, he appears to have flung open the door to a dream.

Closer to home, behind the mountains that bounded Giuseppe Talamini's world, in Saalfelden, Austria, men were also wielding pickaxes. They too raked large chunks of snow into a waiting train. Those taking off in a hot-air balloon and floating through the vast, cloudless sky might have been able to see them — the men in various locations who, without knowing of one another's existence, were slaving away in the snow and longing for a hot meal.

Giuseppe's group laboured for another four hours until the carriages were full and the sun was high in the sky, suspended between the mountain ridges. The horses were given a bite of snow, and the men got back into the coach. They were silent, tired. Leaning on one another's shoulders, they slept. Only Giuseppe kept his eyes wide open. The door of the dream had been opened a crack, and he wanted nothing better than to walk through.

Why Giuseppe Talamini Fled to the New World

The girl next door had become a woman, with a body bursting at the seams. It had happened almost overnight. She had turned into a beauty, curvaceous and voluptuous, and she wasn't ashamed of her new body, either. In fact, Maria Grazia now actively met men's eyes when she was out in the street or at the bakery. She was aware of the effect when she opened her mouth a little, her lips parted slightly. It was one of the best combinations imaginable: naughty yet gracious.

Whenever Giuseppe spotted her in the street, he immediately looked away. He was afraid of her; a mere glimpse of her hair hanging in loose waves down her back was enough to set his pulse racing. They never spoke these days, but his right hand missed her left hand, the hand he'd held all summer for years on end.

My father's father's father lived in the house in which I too grew up. It's on the edge of the village, which was hardly any smaller back then than it is now. Most of the houses have thick walls that are more than a hundred years old. But they accommodate fewer people nowadays. And like the houses, the streets are less lively, too. My generation has moved elsewhere, to towns and cities. Every autumn, when the ice-cream season is over, my brother and his wife return to the mountains. He's an exception. Venas di Cadore is becoming a village of old men and women, a village slowly emptying.