The Ice-Cream Makers (30 page)

In the attic, she kissed me. The fresh taste of her mouth yanked me out of my thoughts. Her hands slid across my legs, my groin, my balls. She was giving me a hand job.

‘Shall I use some oil?'

Before I had a chance to reply, Sophia reached for the bedside cabinet and pulled out a small bottle. She dripped some oil into the palm of her hand and started massaging me. Her right hand moved slowly up and down and enclosed the tip of my prick in her fist.

‘Nice?'

Yes, bloody nice. This really wasn't right.

‘Any other requests?'

She laughed and continued the massage. She was using two hands, her fingers entwined. It was a particular technique, an undulating movement. I felt a continuous pressure on my prick. It was divine.

‘Don't come just yet,' she said and squeezed my penis hard.

My eyes opened. You wouldn't believe what your eye can alight on. I saw the flaking paint of the frame. Luca's bed. We were in his bed. As a boy, Luca had scratched the paint off when he was angry because we weren't allowed to go out and play. I remember it well.

Why had I not booked a hotel? The executive rooms at the Bilderberg Park Hotel were spacious and light. It's where, in recent years, we'd accommodated the poets invited to the World Poetry Festival. The views across the centre of town were gorgeous.

Her hands were everywhere. Her whole body, in fact; her legs, her mouth, her hair. Everything was spinning around me — the sheets, the pillow, her bare feet. Or was it the thought of my brother, who was making ice-cream? Churn, churn, churn.

I felt her nails in my back. Now she was sitting on top of me. As she looked down at me she began to move slowly. She found her rhythm, controlled, infinitely patient.

‘Giovanni,' I heard her say at some point. ‘Where's your mind?'

‘Nowhere.'

‘That's not true.'

I was in Venas di Cadore the day of their wedding.

She stopped moving.

‘Don't stop,' I said.

‘You men tend to bottle it all up.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You and your brother. Your whole family.' She stopped those wonderful movements of her cunt around my prick.

I had slept with her mother. I had seduced her after the wedding party. Her husband had already gone home. She'd had too much to drink and we left without saying goodbye. We did it in the street, standing up, in the small square behind the bakery. Her fur stole around her shoulders, her dark-blue skirt hiked up to her waist. Her hands against the plaster wall.

In one fell swoop I rolled Sophia over, onto her stomach. She looked over her shoulder, obviously startled, but she soon relaxed when I ran my fingers across her back. Her white buttocks, her curvy hips — she was immaculate. I entered her and began thrusting, in and out, harder and harder. I supported myself with my hands. She bit my fingers.

I had to stop thinking about my brother, stop thinking about the ice-cream churning in the machines. I had to stop thinking about the flaky paint of the bed we were lying in. I had to stop thinking about her mother. Lines of poetry spun around in my head; they plunged into my mind like water from a great height, and purged everything.

And so it felt as if that night, like in Lorca's poem, I rode the pick of the roads, on a mother-of-pearl mare without bridle or stirrups.

‘A Soft, Feathery Breath'

My son was born one cold morning in May. It had been raining when Sophia and Luca drove to hospital, fast and anxious, a small suitcase with baby clothes on the backseat. It was night and the streets were quiet, the traffic lights flashing.

The labour took hours. Luca stood behind Sophia, holding her hands. Never before had he felt so close to his wife — not in front of the altar, nor in bed. He caressed her forehead and encouraged her. By the time the contractions had become more frequent, the clouds had drifted off towards the north. The sun rose above the river, the sky turned pale and blue, container ships set sail for the sea. Giuseppe Talamini, all crumpled and wet, washed ashore into the arms of the midwife. He weighed a paltry five pounds. Squinty eyes, glistening lips, barely a hair on his head. The birds sang in the flowering trees.

I was in Barcelona. It had been a clear night, the morning warm and lively. Men in suits drank their coffee standing in small cafés, cars drove bumper to bumper along the wide avenues. It was hot and close in the metro. The news from Rotterdam didn't reach me until the evening. I had spent the whole day listening to poets and sound artists. They had gathered at the Festival Internacional de Poesia de Barcelona to experiment with words and sounds. A French poet was accompanied by singing sand dunes; another poet was impossible to understand, which seemed to be part of the piece.

Along with my key, the receptionist at Hotel Catalunya handed me a folded note with the ice-cream parlour's phone number. That instant I knew Sophia had had a child. A boy, as she had confided in me the day the parlour opened.

‘Come here,' she had said. ‘I've got something to tell you.'

I was standing in front of the display, she behind it, a
spatola
in her hand.

We leaned towards each other, over the first ice-cream of the season. ‘It's a boy,' she whispered.

I didn't know how to react, what to say.

‘We're having a son,' she said.

All I could do was stare. Her cheeks had filled out and her eyebrows appeared to be coarser. The blue apron no longer concealed her belly, her bigger breasts.

‘Don't tell anyone,' she said. ‘Beppi and your mother don't know yet.' Then she straightened up again.

‘Are you pleased?'

‘Yes, really pleased.'

She beamed as if she had only just heard the news herself and I was the first she shared it with. She had a little boy growing inside her, a little curled-up creature with hands and feet, nails and hair. The son of my brother and me.

‘I think he's asleep now,' Sophia said, still in a whisper. ‘But when he's awake you can feel him move.'

A couple of days later, she let me feel it. I was standing outside the World Poetry offices, key in hand, when she came running out into the street. It was morning — the ice-cream parlour hadn't opened yet. Sophia wasn't wearing her apron; in fact, it looked as if she wasn't wearing anything at all. Her body practically burst out of her clothes. I could see everything: hips, buttocks, breasts. And her belly. She took my hand and placed it on the tightly stretched fabric of her shirt.

‘Can you feel him?'

Not right away. It took a couple of seconds before I felt a tiny but distinct movement under the palm of my hand.

Sophia put her hand next to mine. I could feel her fingers. So this is what it was like to become a mother and father. We stood still while everything around us was in motion: the clouds, the leaves on the trees, the trams on Westersingel, the cars, the schoolkids on their bikes, the twirling knife of the butcher slicing ham.

Luca had come out. I had pulled my hand away. A reflex. I didn't even think about it.

‘Good morning, uncle,' he said.

Yes, that was my role, my function.

‘He felt him,' Sophia said.

‘His little hand,' Luca said with a smile. ‘He's dreaming of churning ice-cream.'

We hadn't spoken much since. I had travelled a lot in autumn and then winter had come. The whole family had been in Venas while I was in Rotterdam.

Sophia walked back to the ice-cream parlour. Time to start work.

‘A boy,' I said to my brother.

‘Yes, terrific.'

‘All fingers and toes accounted for? Is he healthy?'

‘The gynaecologist says he's developing well.'

‘Good.'

‘How are you?'

I didn't respond at once. He had never asked me how I was.

‘Busy,' I replied eventually.

Luca didn't react.

‘Lots of reading,' I explained.

‘Are you staying in Rotterdam for a while?'

‘I'm off to Scotland in two weeks' time.'

Let's face it, perhaps we had been avoiding each other. I had slept with his wife.

‘What name would you give him?' he asked.

‘I haven't given it any thought, to be honest.'

‘What names do you like?'

‘You're putting me on the spot.'

‘Surely you can think of something?'

I thought for a moment.

‘Otello.'

‘Otello? What sort of a name is that? Must be a poet.'

‘No. Shakespeare wrote a play with that title, a tragedy, but I'm thinking of Otello without an “h”.' I didn't want to saddle Sophia and Luca's son with the name of a man who murders his wife and then takes his own life. ‘It's the first name of the inventor of the mechanical ice-cream machine,' I said. ‘Otello Cattabriga.'

Luca nodded. He spent more hours with those machines than with people. My father had bought them second-hand. They outlasted an ice-cream maker.

The name had a ring to it, I thought. The rhythm, the combination of long and short vowels — there was something grand about it. With a name like that you were bound to make a major invention sooner or later. When Otello Cattabriga patented his mechanical system in 1927, his machine went global. Otello Talamini. If my father had borne that name he might have invented something huge.

‘We're thinking of Giuseppe,' my brother said. ‘His granddad's name.'

‘And that of his great-great-grandfather.'

‘Yes.'

A traditional name. The name of an ice-cream maker.

My mother said the name after I keyed in the ice-cream parlour's number on the cordless phone in my hotel room. It was the first thing she said. ‘It's a boy,' she exclaimed, not knowing I already knew. She knew nothing.

I lay down on the bed, the phone pressed to my ear.

‘He's so cute,' she said. ‘Such a beautiful baby. He's got hardly any hair on his head.' The joy of a brand-new grandmother.

My father came on the line, too. ‘Giovanni,' he said. ‘Where are you? Get yourself over here at once. You've never seen such a gorgeous little fellow.'

‘I'm flying back the day after tomorrow. I'll pop round straight away.'

‘He smiles in his sleep. He's amazing. He's a marvel!'

There was interference on the line. Or perhaps it was noise from the ice-cream parlour. I looked at the kettle on the desk, at the folder with information. The Museum of Contemporary Art was only a stone's throw from the hotel.

‘Are you still there?' my father asked.

‘Yes. How's Sophia doing?'

‘She's doing well. She did a great job. We're expecting her home tomorrow.'

‘Where's Luca?'

‘He's in the kitchen, making ice-cream.'

He had gone straight back to work, right after the delivery, I would have imagined.

We had no cordless phone in the ice-cream parlour, not back then anyway. ‘I'll call him later,' I said. ‘He must have lots of ice-cream to make.'

‘Yes, the ice-cream machines have never been idle for this long in spring.'

The next day I didn't bother about work. I told the organisers of the Festival Internacional de Poesia that I wasn't coming and hung the
Do not disturb
sign on my room door. Sunlight fell through a gap between the curtains. Motes of dust swirled around in that bright strip. I thought of Sophia's hands. I didn't want to think about them. I wanted to think about the little boy lying next to his mother in the hospital bed, peaceful, dreaming of the velvet womb. They were going home today. But the thought of her hands won out. It was a film that kept playing in my head. The oil, her intertwined fingers, the undulating movement. Was this the pleasure my brother enjoyed? Each time I tried to stop the film, to see how much oil there was in the bottle she took out of the bedside cabinet. It had been divine, so delicious, that even now, nine months later, I still thought about it, still wanted her hands. Just her hands. It was lust, pure and simple.

Late morning a key was inserted into the lock and then the door to my room flung open. It was a chambermaid, dark hair in a bun, white apron.

‘
Mi disculpa
,' I heard her say. ‘
Disculpa
!' The door slammed shut.

The sense of loss came later. After I had seen little Giuseppe. From the station I went straight to the ice-cream parlour. It was a clear day in May, the sun high in the sky. I arrived at Venezia bathed in sweat. My mother stood behind the counter; Luca was working in the kitchen, my father hiding behind the espresso machine.

‘She's resting,' my mother said. ‘She'll be down shortly.'

I shook my head. I wanted to go upstairs, eager to see the baby.