The Ice-Cream Makers (34 page)

But in the end he had bought him a stubby screwdriver, the kind for hard-to-reach areas. My mother told him to return the thing at once. ‘Do you have any idea how dangerous that is to a baby?' she had said. ‘It's not a rattle.'

‘That's right,' my father responded. ‘It's a stubby crosshead screwdriver.'

‘What's Giuseppe supposed to do with it?'

‘He liked it.'

‘He likes everything! Are you planning on buying him a racing bike too?'

‘No, of course not.'

‘I want you to return that screwdriver right now.'

‘No.'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘No.'

‘In that case,
I'll
return it.'

‘All right, all right, I get it. We're not supposed to enjoy life. Not when we're young, and not when we're old, either.'

My father took Giuseppe back to Spijkermand and returned the stubby screwdriver, but then on a whim bought the pneumatic drill instead. ‘That one,' he said to the salesman. ‘That one,' his grandson echoed.

With the pneumatic drill in the stroller, Beppi headed back to the ice-cream parlour. Giuseppe sat on his shoulders with a big smile on his face, oblivious to the dark clouds gathering above Venezia.

My mother wanted to hurl her
spatola
at Beppi, but she was afraid she might hit her grandchild.

Sophia was familiar with this kind of situation, absurd as it was. She knew she had to intervene. ‘There's a shop with wooden toys on Nieuwe Binnenweg,' she said, ‘and they've got beautiful tools. Why don't we go and have a look this afternoon?'

She had spoken calmly, quietly, without gesticulating, trying to sound as neutral as possible.

Beppi looked at the pneumatic drill in the stroller, perhaps realising briefly how ridiculous a purchase it was. Briefly, but long enough. That afternoon Giuseppe was given a large rectangular box containing a wooden saw and a wooden drill. His grandfather showed him how to use the tools.

Sophia kept the peace, engineered reconciliation, and kept the family together.

‘Are you sure it was a pneumatic drill?' my brother asks.

We are in Venezia's kitchen. One ice-cream machine is churning. It's eleven o'clock in the evening. Sophia is in bed, Beppi and my mother are in Italy. Sara is serving ice-cream. A native of Vodo di Cadore, she has been working at the parlour for a couple of years now. Sara joined when my mother no longer wanted to leave Beppi alone in Venas, perhaps because she was getting on herself. Sara is in her early twenties, plain but extremely reliable. She stays all season and sleeps in the attic. Luca and Sophia sleep on the floor below, in my parents' old room.

‘Mamma told me the story,' I say.

‘Sometimes I get the impression that you make stories up. Or you change or swap things round to fill gaps.'

‘It was the kind of drill you use to break through walls. A gigantic contraption, quite unsuitable for a ten-month-old child. That's what she told me.'

‘I'm not talking about the drill,' my brother says.

We're silent. The humming sound of the Cattabriga's motor fills the kitchen as the scraper blade rotates almost noiselessly through the fluid mass. The ice-cream is nowhere near done.

Sometimes we sit outside, but that means Luca has to get up when there's someone in front of the counter. Sara is off two nights a week, which is when Luca does the serving. But he gets to sit down most of that time. It's not that warm anymore. October, the last month of the season. There are hardly any customers after ten.

We talk and we don't talk, we look at each other and we look away. Giuseppe has been gone for nearly three months. He hasn't phoned again, but we did receive a postcard with a picture of a Native American wearing a beautiful, multi-coloured headdress. The postmark shows it was posted a week earlier, in Mérida. The address was not in Giuseppe's hand; the handwriting was more rounded.

‘It was written by a girl,' I tell my brother. ‘He's in love.'

Luca doesn't believe me. He believes the postcard is from a customer. It is not uncommon for the ice-cream parlour to receive postcards from exotic countries.

‘But there's no text on it,' I say.

‘There is on the front,' my brother reacts. ‘Greetings from Mexico!'

Sometimes we are pleased to see a customer, so Luca has to go inside to get a cup or a cone, or to make a milkshake for a lonely man.

There are no such disruptions in the kitchen, where Luca only has the machines to hide behind. He still sends me away when the ice-cream is ready. Since he wants to be alone for that, I go home, and we meet again the following evening.

We talk and we tell each other everything we know, trying to weave together two halves: what I remember and what Luca remembers.

‘Sometimes I get the idea that you suppress things,' I say. ‘That you say you don't remember something just so you don't have to talk about it.'

‘What am I supposed to remember? Look around you. Look at the tiles, the cabinets, the ice-cream machines, the worktop.' He's talking louder and louder. He's angry. Like Beppi, he feels betrayed. Everybody has turned against him. Even his own brother. ‘Look at the strip lights, the metal containers. That's what I saw, day in, day out. That's what I remember.'

How many summers has my brother skipped now? How many has he sacrificed?

‘And if I wasn't here, I was outside or behind the espresso machine or serving ice-cream.'

The first couple of years after my father retired, Luca was forced to work for two. He would make ice-cream in the mornings and evenings and then wait tables the rest of the time. My mother would be behind the counter with Sophia. She managed to keep this up for five years, before deciding to stay in the mountains with Beppi. She had worked until she was nearly seventy. Her hair had turned the colour of fig-and-almond ice-cream. The following season Sara came along, but they were still one person short. Until Giuseppe turned sixteen, that is, and was no longer of school age.

‘You think I know more about him than you, but I reckon it's the other way around.'

I remember Giuseppe's first day in the ice-cream parlour. It was the middle of June, so the schools in Italy had closed. He had travelled alone by train, a rucksack over his shoulders, headphones over his ears. A typical teenager. His clothes smelled of the stuffy compartment he had travelled in from Milan. Over a thousand kilometres. Later that same evening, he was put to work.

I could tell from his face, from the sad frown between his eyebrows, that he didn't fancy it one bit. His friends in Italy were not working, free to enjoy the balmy evening. The sky was as blue and empty as the long days ahead of them. But he had to walk up and down the terrace and take orders. This was the first summer that was taken from him.

He had helped out in the ice-cream parlour before. As a little boy, he had made ice-cream with my brother. Separating eggs, pureeing fruits, grinding nuts. Giuseppe had come up with a new flavour. Apricot, peach, mango, plum, and a touch of orange — his very own ice-cream. He and Luca scooped it out of the Cattabriga, their thumbs around the handle of the
spatolone
, which was nearly twice as big as Giuseppe himself. Later he had cleared tables, the tray in both hands like the wheel of a lorry. And when he was finally tall enough to see over the counter, he had served ice-cream, too. Alongside his mother, occasionally snacking on the sprinkles.

But when he'd had enough or he wanted to play, he was always allowed to go. Usually he would run off to the square on Schiedamse Vest, where he played football with other boys from the neighbour-hood. He was incredibly quick, and yelled out their names when he wanted someone to pass him the ball. Sometimes he would come back to the ice-cream parlour with ten little boys, their cheeks flushed, their hair wet with sweat. They were all given a cone, and they licked their ice-cream with the sun high above them. Summers were still summers back then.

I felt for Giuseppe when he had to work in the ice-cream parlour and couldn't get away anymore. He looked uncomfortable, tortured, but Luca seemed oblivious. He suppressed it and continues to suppress it.

Mid-week I suddenly spotted Giuseppe in the theatre's large auditorium. I thought I must be mistaken, that it was a young man who was the spitting image of him — the same innocent face, the same long, dark hair. But it was him all right. He was the first member of the family to come to the World Poetry Festival. I tried to establish eye contact, but he didn't see me. His eyes were on the stage, where the South African poet Gert Vlok Nel was reading. A big bloke with strong arms, but with poetry that was wistful and personal, like the songs he sang in cafés while strumming his guitar. A sailor with a velvet voice. He looked at the audience as if looking at a woman he hadn't seen in years.

After the performance, I lost sight of Giuseppe. I couldn't see him anywhere in the foyer or at the bar. I wanted to introduce him to Gert Vlok Nel, the poet who smelled of his poetry, of whirlwinds and gum trees, of a canoe made of zinc. The three of us could have a beer or something, I thought.

Giuseppe had stalked off after an argument with his father. I got the story not from Giuseppe but from Luca. ‘He didn't want to work,' my brother said, ‘because he'd worked all day. He reckoned he deserved an evening off.'

Luca couldn't get his head round it. His father had spent fifty-seven years in the ice-cream parlour, while he had racked up some thirty years, and now Giuseppe complained after a mere four days. ‘You work eight months and then you get four months off,' he told his son. ‘That's how it works, that's the life of an ice-cream maker.'

‘I'm not an ice-cream maker.'

‘Yes, you are. We're all ice-cream makers.'

‘Uncle Giovanni isn't.'

My brother exploded. ‘Uncle Giovanni is a traitor!' he yelled.

‘No, he's not.'

‘Yes, he is. He abandoned us.'

‘He just does as he pleases.'

‘We can't all do as we please. Some of us have to work!'

They were in the kitchen. The door was closed, but everybody could hear them: Sophia and Sara, and the customers sitting inside and spooning up their ice-cream coupes with fruit and whipped cream.

‘Uncle Giovanni works for the World Poetry Festival.'

‘That's not work. Not real work, anyway. Do you know who pays for that festival? Not the people who visit it, but the people who have real jobs, who pay tax, because that's what subsidises the festival, including your uncle's salary. I work for him.'

‘You're just jealous.'

‘No, I'm not.'

‘Yes, you are.'

‘You're sixteen and you don't know everything there is to know,' Luca said. ‘And now shut up and get to work.' The father had spoken his final word to his son.

Giuseppe had gone to work, with that deep frown in his forehead, but at eight o'clock he had taken off his apron and without another word he had walked out, under the red-and-white striped awning.

‘Sophia called out his name, but he didn't turn round.'

‘I saw him,' I said. ‘He was at the festival. I spotted him in the audience.'

‘What?'

‘He was listening to a poet.'

It still bothers him. It keeps coming up; we keep talking about that evening. ‘He did it to taunt me,' Luca claims.

‘He did it because he was curious.'

‘No. He did it to hurt me. He knew how much I'd mind, otherwise he'd have gone to the cinema, or the park.'

We can't agree. He hadn't seen the way Giuseppe listened to the South African poet. Riveted, moved. Not driven by vengeance.

‘Was he already drinking beer by then?'

‘Why do you ask?'

‘Because I want to know.'

Luca doesn't know how Giuseppe looked at Gert Vlok Nel. I don't know whether he was already drinking alcohol. We fill in the gaps of the story.

‘I reckon he was. He's been sixteen for some time. In the winter I'd taken him to Bar Posta and we were both the worse for wear as we walked home. Yes, now I remember. Giuseppe was drunk on two beers, me on the pleasure of seeing him again, of sitting in a bar with him. It was the first time he'd come along.'

We listen carefully when the other is telling a story only he knows, the way Luca had listened to me in the kitchen a couple of days earlier when I told him about the occasions when I had seen Giuseppe play football on the square on Schiedamse Vest. ‘He was the best,' I said proudly. ‘All the boys wanted to be on his team.'

‘Did you see him score a goal?'

‘He cheered and the other boys ran up to him and jumped all over him. They hugged like professional players.'

‘What were you doing there?'

He sounded pissed off, which was not unusual for him in the middle of a conversation, but he must have realised it because he immediately followed up with another question. ‘Had you made your way to that square especially for him?'