The Ice-Cream Makers (38 page)

I walk through the dining room to Luca and Sophia's bedroom. The table is still littered with plates and glasses from dinner. Flies are gorging on the food scraps. The kitchen counter is crammed, and encrusted pans fill the sink. It looks forlorn, condemned. My brother can't manage without Sophia, and the ice-cream parlour can't manage without Giuseppe. Maybe he'll hold out for a couple of seasons, with the help of extra staff, but in the end you need a son, a successor.

Giuseppe had brought the ice-cream machines to a halt on the day he was born; now they may grind to a halt for good.

I place my hand on the door handle, but don't enter just yet. There's no sound behind the door. No rustling of sheets, no coughing, no snoring. Sophia doesn't stir. I have no idea if she'll listen to me, if my words can rouse her from her torpor. What do we know about the workings of a heart? How can you make it forget the pain, how can you give it hope again?

Then I press down the handle and open the door. The hinges creak, the heat hits me in the face. It's dark and dead quiet. My head is spinning when I enter the room. Everything is churning.

A Beginning, an End

After two bitterly cold winters and a summer filled with cicada song, Giuseppe returned. Azure skies, days of St John's wort, clover, and water milfoil. Time had advanced mightily yet leisurely in the Cadore Valley, had unfurled the seasons and pulled them back in again. Trees had been cut, cows had calved, boys had grown into men. Maria Grazia felt their eyes on her body, but she walked on quickly when anyone accosted her in the street. She hid in her room or went to the forest, visiting places she had been to with Giuseppe. She found them all: the place where the light fell in spokes between the tree trunks and where they searched for pinecones, the meadow where they picked dandelions, the patch of grass in which they lay like a life-sized clock. Only the Antelao was too daunting.

A year had passed since Giuseppe's disappearance. Everyone had been perplexed. His mother had sat waiting for him in his room for days, the window he had climbed out of left open as if in expectation of an imminent return. He had set off in the half-light of the early morning without leaving a note, without a word to his brothers and sisters. Maria Grazia could have solved the mystery, but she was afraid to tell Giuseppe's mother what had happened the night before his departure — the night in which she had confessed her love to him and had begged him for a child. She kept it inside, a secret. At times she was consumed by guilt, but some days she couldn't believe Giuseppe had left because of her. What had she done wrong? She had shown her body to him, her white breasts and amber-coloured nipples.

Nobody knew where Giuseppe might be. The first couple of days, all the men in the village went out searching: the metalsmith, the locksmith, Enrico Zangrando, his father. The man who had always whistled while out and about now walked quietly through the countryside. They went on long hikes in the mountains and stood on the glacier of the Antelao. They thought he might have fallen while harvesting snow.

In autumn, two months later, when the woodcutter stood at the corner of the Volksgarten with his stove, and the aroma of roasted chestnuts filled the streets of Vienna, people were still looking out for him. For a split second Bruno thought he spotted him across the street, but even as he called out Giuseppe's name he knew it was someone else, a young man with the same strong shoulders and dark hair, but a different face. Delicate and carefree.

As time went by, Maria Grazia kept her faith in Giuseppe's return. She was convinced he was thinking of her, wherever he might be. She waited for him. All summer long. The farmers gathered in the hay once more; fruit was cooked and preserved in jars. Hailstones the size of walnuts fell from the sky as thunderstorms swept across the villages.

‘How long do you intend to wait for him?' her mother asked.

Maria Grazia didn't respond. She looked out at the dark clouds.

‘Do you want to be left on the shelf?'

Again, no response, just a deepening furrow in the girl's forehead. Two days ago, the mother had seen her daughter emerge from the forest, holding the hem of her dress and looking at the pinecones she had gathered in there.

‘Maria Grazia,' her mother said. ‘I asked you a question. Do you want to be left on the shelf?'

‘No.'

‘Then maybe you ought to look around you once in a while and not always down at the ground.' She looked at her daughter, who was more beautiful than her other daughters, the most beautiful girl in the village. It was unbearable. The sadness around her mouth, the film covering her eyes. ‘He won't be back,' she said. ‘Forget about him. Start looking for someone else — a man who doesn't just walk off, who gets up in the morning and goes to work. You hear me? He won't be back!'

She paid no attention. Maria Grazia heard her mother talking, but the words didn't register. She knew that one day he would knock on their door, as he had done when she was younger. She could picture him walking through the village — dirty clothes, threadbare shoes, finally returned from a long journey. She had dreams, lucid-like visions.

Yet her heart wasn't narrow, as in Shelley's poem, the heart that loves one object. Maria Grazia's heart was strong and steadfast.

The summer passed and she continued to wait for him. The autumn that followed was mild but wet. The clouds were trapped between the mountains. It rained for five consecutive days. The streets were flushed clean, and the water of the Piave turned a rusty brown. Then the second winter arrived, even colder than the first. The temperature dropped to twenty degrees below zero, and the wind was as sharp as a scythe. Those who had no business outside stayed in, in front of the burning stove. It was for this the trees had been cut down, the trunks cleaved. It was for this a vast stockpile of wood had been prepared in the middle of summer. The snow didn't start falling until January. Most people had anticipated it. It was in the air, you could smell it. Within an hour the fields were white, and by evening the roofs were covered in a thick blanket of snow.

The following morning, children emerged from their houses and ran through the snow with flushed cheeks. The sun brought light and warmth; the sky was cornflower blue. People shovelled the snow off their doorsteps, and streets were cleared with the help of oxen, which blew little clouds through their wet nostrils. Only Maria Grazia stayed inside, in her room with the blankets pulled over her head so as not to hear the cheerful noises outside.

The girl who had turned to the sun like a sunflower and who had traced circles on her arms with dandelion milk, the girl who had become a woman in the course of a single summer and had taken boys' breath away by looking them straight in the eye and parting her lips a little — she was in bed and wouldn't come out.

A crying shame, the men of the village thought. But none of them were capable of rousing Maria Grazia from her lethargy.

January turned to February turned to March. Everything melted, dwindled, trickled, and evaporated, except the snow on the glaciers, the necklace around the peak of the Antelao. When Giuseppe saw it sparkling from a distance, he knew he was nearly home. His clothes were indeed dirty, his soles threadbare. He had been gone for almost two years. His nose and forehead were tanned by the sun.

The first person to spot Giuseppe in the Cadore Valley had been so stunned and delighted he barely took in the traveller's words. According to the bricklayer Pietro Zaetta, Giuseppe was supposed to have said, ‘Greetings, paleface.' But he wasn't entirely sure.

The news reached the village before Giuseppe himself, spreading through the streets and houses like wildfire. His father, his mother, his brothers and sisters all came out and made their way to the main road. There he was, in the distance, a black dot getting bigger and bigger. They couldn't wait to take him into their arms.

Maria Grazia threw off the blankets and stepped out of bed. She had heard the shouting, the screams of disbelief and joy. Children were yelling his name. Her legs had to get used to the weight they had to carry, her eyes to the light outside. She felt as though she was still dreaming when she laid eyes on him. He had turned into a giant, bigger and stronger than when he left. She didn't know it then, but he had built a skyscraper, constructed a railway line, since he had left their valley.

Giuseppe was pulled inside by his mother, but later that same evening he knocked on his neighbour's door. She looked into his eyes, dark-blue eyes that had seen the Atlantic Ocean and the vast emptiness of the Great Plains. Giuseppe didn't look away. He was no longer afraid. He didn't take his eyes off her and saw how beautiful she was, despite her dry skin and dull hair. She had a beauty that outshines all else.

In his cardboard suitcase, he had carried back with him a Native American headdress and a pair of jeans with pockets filled with red sand from the prairies of South Dakota. He had put down railway sleepers under the burning sun, hunted buffalo in Wyoming, and gawped at a woman in a silk dress whose perfume had intoxicated him in New York, but he had come back. The threads hadn't snapped; the gossamer remained intact. It had brought him back to her.

And now it was spring. The highest peaks were covered in snow, the fields were turning green, and down by the river the air was thick with the smell of cut logs. Giuseppe climbed the Antelao with Maria Grazia and stole snow from the king. They experienced everything afresh. He saw the tiny beads on her nose; she saw the wet patches on his clothes. They had to squeeze their eyes shut in the blinding light, and the sweat on his bare arms evaporated. The snow melted in the straw basket.

Down in the valley, in the basement, he set the wheel of the ice-cream machine in motion, the wheel that had been still for so long. They made sorbet out of apricot jam and ate it together, spoon after spoon, but on the days that followed Giuseppe sold various flavours of ice-cream by the side of the main road, gradually attracting more and more people. His thumb became calloused, while her skin turned the colour of honey, and her long hair shone in the sun.

No longer afraid, he now spoke the language of love. They had a baby: my father's father, my grandfather. And so the ice-cream machine kept churning.

List of Cited Poems

• ‘Today' by Nurit Zarchi, translation by Lisa Katz, in
Prairie Schooner
, vol. 79, no. 1, Spring 2005, p. 62.

• ‘What It Is' by Erich Fried, based on the translation by Anna Kallio (some punctuation has been added),
The Adirondack Review
, vol. IV, no. 1, Summer 2003, available at http://www.theadirondackreview.com/transfried.html.

•
Epipsychidion: verses addressed to the noble and unfortunate Lady, Emilia V—, now imprisoned in the convent of —
by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles and James Ollier, London, 1821, available at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45119.

•
Adonaïs: an elegy on the death of John Keats, author of
Endymion
,
Hyperion
, etc.
by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Charles and James Ollier, London, 1821, available at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45112.

• ‘First Day of Spring' by J.C. Bloem, translation by Laura Vroomen.

• ‘Ode to the Ice Cheese' by Yang Wanli, c. 1100, quoted at http://www.silkroadgourmet.com/the-origins-of-ice-cream.

• ‘The World Turned Upside Down' by Maura Dooley, in
Life Under Water
, Bloodaxe Books, Hexham, 2008.

• ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home' by Craig Raine, in
A Martian
Sends a Postcard Home
, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979, p. 1.

• ‘But the Sky is Always Bluer' by Rino Gaetano, translation based on that submitted by Riccardo (some lines have been altered), 2007, available at http://lyricstranslate.com/en/ma-il-cielo-e039-sempre-piu039-blu-sky-always-more-blue.html.

• T.S. Eliot, as quoted in ‘An Encounter with T.S. Eliot', 2007, available at https://donmehwest.wordpress.com/my-encounter-with-ts-eliot.

• ‘Just Living' by Patrick Lane, in
Selected Poems: 1977–1997
, Harbour Publishing, Pender Harbour, 1997.

• ‘I Would' by Antjie Krog, translation by Tony Ullyatt, 2012, available at http://versindaba.co.za/2012/01/12/antjie-krog-vert.

• ‘Touch' by Manglesh Dabral, translation based on that by Sudeep Sen (some lines have been altered), 2008, available at http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/12586/auto/0/TOUCH. Poem appears in
Mujhe Dikha Ek Manushya
(
I Saw a Human Being
), Radhakrishna Prakashan, New Delhi, 2008.

• ‘Thinking of something, carelessly' by Marina Tsvetaeva, translation by A.S. Kline, 2010, available at http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Russian/Tsvetaeva.htm#_Toc254018915.

• ‘I was stolen by the gypsies …' by Charles Simic, in
New and Selected Poems: 1962–2012
, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York and Boston, 2003.

• ‘The Unfaithful Wife' by Federico García Lorca, translation by Lynn Margulis and Richard Guerrero, in
The Massachusetts Review
, vol. 44, issue 3, Autumn 2000, p. 338.

• ‘The Unfaithful Housewife', translation by Conor O'Callaghan, in
Poetry
, June 2011, available at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/242108.