The Ice-Cream Makers (15 page)

My father did speak to me, but everything he said resonated with the hope that one day I would convert back to ice-cream. I had strayed, and it was his job to make me realise I had made the wrong decision. I had chosen a life without the ice-cream parlour, without family. Sooner or later I would come to regret it.

‘Do you hear this music?' he said. ‘It's Rino Gaetano.'

It was after midnight; the chairs outside had been stacked up, the doors closed. My father had switched on the stereo, something he only did after a good day. A good day for an ice-cream maker is when it's scorching hot and he has to work like a dog.

I knew the song: ‘Ma il cielo è sempre più blu', or ‘But the Sky is Always Bluer'. It was a classic, a song with a heart of gold. You couldn't help but sing along when it came on. As little children we had often hollered it without knowing what the lyrics meant.

My father kicked things off. ‘
Who lives in a shack, who sweats for his salary / who loves to love and dreams of glory
.' Luca joined in: ‘
Who robs pensions, who has a short memory / who eats once a day, who plays at target practice
.'

For a fleeting moment I felt like an outsider. It was a protest song. Rino Gaetano had written the song for all those who suffered, day in, day out. Not for me, not for someone whose job had fallen into his lap, who did have a summer, who had sex with angelic girls and slept till noon. But as Gaetano's voice got louder and the chorus built, I couldn't help but sing along: ‘
But the sky is always bluer, uh uh, uh uh, / But the sky is always bluer, uh uh, uh uh, uh uh
...'

My mother's eyes filled with tears as she heard us sing and scream. We sang with the same passion as Rino Gaetano, who had been born in Crotone, a small town on the Ionian Sea, had moved to Rome — to the big city — and achieved immense success, becoming a national hero before losing his life in a car accident at the age of thirty. Life was unfair, but the sky is always blue, always bluer.

Perhaps it was this section that my father loved the most. He certainly sang it at the top of his lungs, an exclamation mark after each line:

Who hasn't got a house, who lives alone
Who earns very little, who plays with fire
Who lives in Calabria, who lives on love
Who fought in the war, who just scrapes by
Who makes it to eighty, who dies with his boots on

My father didn't earn very little, didn't live in Calabria, and hadn't fought in the war, but he did die with his boots on. Not literally, but very gradually. To him that was the crux of the song. And of his life.

After the song had finished, all three of us were panting, our chests rising and falling in sync, and my father said, ‘That's what I call poetry.'

He had to have a dig at me.

And kick me when I was down. ‘Rino Gaetano is the greatest poet in the world.'

This was supposed to be followed by the line, ‘Not Shelley, not Szymborska, not Kaváfis, not Atwood', except he didn't know the names of any of these poets, ‘with their difficult words and their incomprehensible language'.

According to my father, there was only one poet, and that was Rino Gaetano, who had managed to break through to my father's heart and touch his invisible soul. The young man from Crotone thought of himself as a writer first and a singer second. After he'd written his first album, he was rumoured to have told the producers to go in search of someone who could actually sing his songs. He didn't think his own voice was good enough. Too rough, too gravelly. They had to force him into the studio.

I believe you can be both poet and singer. A bard. It's the way Achilles' rage was sung, and the way ‘Mr Tambourine Man' reached us. I have invited Bob Dylan to the World Poetry Festival several times, but have yet to receive a letter back. Perhaps he is waiting for the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the olden days the world was divided into prisoners and guards; these days it's made up of people who think Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize and those who think the very idea is preposterous.

That night I stayed over in Rotterdam, in the attic, with my brother. He pretended to be asleep, but I could tell from his breathing that he was still awake. I waited for the question he had asked so often when we were children; I was hoping he would ask me what was on my mind.

I was thinking of him, or of us really. Of the silence between us.

‘Are you thinking of Sophia?' I asked after a while.

No reply.

‘I asked if you were thinking of Sophia.'

Last winter I hadn't been to Venas, because I had intended to work on my thesis. It was the first time I hadn't come along to Italy. The winter before last I had chopped down a fir tree in the forest with my brother, we had celebrated Christmas together, and we had drunk beer and wine with Sophia in Bar Posta until late. She sat between the two of us on the corner bench and we played Uno. The good thing about playing cards is that you don't have to talk. The way Luca played, you'd have thought there was an astronomical sum of money involved, ten million lira or something. He was completely focused on his cards and silent, like a professional poker player.

I noticed that his right leg was resting against Sophia's left leg. A little later, her right leg touched my left leg.

He let her win, but it was blatant only to someone who was his brother. When we played Uno at home in the warm kitchen, my father and Luca were the most fanatical players. Both were bad losers and were known to occasionally whack the table in anger or shout, ‘The two of you are cheating! The two of you are in cahoots together!' The ‘two of you' in question would always be my mother and me. There were two distinct camps in our family.

There came a point when I could no longer stand Luca's silence, the hypocrisy.

‘You're letting her win,' I said, and put my cards on the table. ‘It's no fun this way.'

My brother didn't say anything. Of course he didn't say anything.

Sophia turned over the cards I had put on the table. ‘You'd never have won with these,' she said without batting an eyelid. ‘You're just a bad loser.'

At times it felt as if there were two distinct camps in Bar Posta too. As if I was the common enemy. But then there were times when Sophia enjoyed seeing Luca in a tight spot, or encouraged me to goad my brother by laying down a particular card. The snowball had been thrown, and I was down but not out.

‘Shall we carry on?'

‘Yes,' replied Luca, the sneaky bastard.

The cards were shuffled and dealt again. This time I won. I felt vindicated.

We carried on playing until last orders. The place stayed open for another half hour after that.

‘Tell me more about Amsterdam,' Sophia said. It was a regular question towards the end of the evening. I had already told her about the cafés full of writers and cigarette smoke and the parties after premières and book launches, but every evening she demanded to hear more.

‘You're not telling me everything,' she said. ‘You're holding back information.'

‘What kind of information?'

‘About girls, about women.'

Luca said nothing. Sophia had no way of knowing that he wasn't talking to me. He had always been like this when the three of us were together.

‘Shall I tell you about Rosa?'

Sophia nodded. ‘Let me guess,' she said. ‘She's tall and blonde.'

‘No.'

‘She's short and she's got troll's teeth.'

‘No.'

‘She's fifteen.'

‘No.'

‘She's fifty.'

‘Almost.'

I was glad the sip of beer Luca had just swallowed didn't go down the wrong way.

‘She's forty-two.'

‘My mother is forty-four.'

‘You've got a young mother,' I said.

We had seen her walking down the street. None of the lustre had gone with the years — her skin was as luminous as ever. The women in the village gossiped about her at the baker's. She was said to be cheating on her husband with the roofer: last summer she had been seen emerging from a field with hay in her hair, followed a few minutes later by the stocky, slightly boorish Salvatore Grigio.

Or that was the story that did the rounds and left the village buzzing with excitement, eager for more.

Luca and I had reached the right age for her tight skirts. We looked over our shoulders and stared at her on the street. Last time we saw her, I wanted to tell him that Sophia was his, her mother mine, but Luca had already walked on.

‘I want to know everything,' Sophia said. Again, she didn't bat an eyelid.

Everything. That included the collection of poetry I had spoken to Rosa about and the question that always rears its head in discussions, the ‘to be or not to be'
of poetry. In the words of Martinus Nijhoff: ‘Should a poet express what we feel, or should we feel what the poet expresses?' But Sophia wasn't interested in any of that. I could skip the poetry.

‘What does she look like? What was she wearing?'

‘She was wearing a short dress and had the sort of breasts any woman would like to have for a day.'

There was nothing wrong with Sophia's breasts. They were not too big, not too small. Pears, I know now. Beautiful little pears.

Rosa's breasts were of an entirely different order, a double-sized portion. Not those immense breasts that turn to jelly without a bra. They remained firm and round, like a juicy fruit that takes two hands to harvest.

‘How did you know?'

‘I didn't know at the time, but it was plain to see.'

Her nipples were erect, as if an almond had been inserted into each breast. It may have been the wind that blew in every time the door was opened. The occasion was a book launch, the location the sumptuous, marble-floored lobby of the publisher's headquarters; a wooden staircase led to the offices on the upper floors. At the start of the night there were no more than twenty people; by late evening their number had tripled.

Sometimes you find yourself talking to someone and you think nothing is happening. There are no clues, no signs, but then suddenly a single remark changes everything.

We were talking about polka dots. There was a girl there with long braids who wore a dress with cheerful dots on it. She walked right past us.

‘I like dots,' I said. ‘On men too, on their shirt or socks.'

‘Does that mean you like moles as well?' Rosa asked.

I couldn't help it. My gaze immediately darted to her neck, to her arms, to her breasts. There's the speed of light, and there's the speed of pupils. I saw moles everywhere.

From poetry to polka dots, from moles to the sheets on the bed that awaited us in a virtually empty attic.

I wasn't allowed to undress myself. ‘Hang on,' she said. ‘Let me do that.' She undid the buttons of my shirt. Her fingers were still cold, but that's the sort of thing only spouses mind. I moved my hands across her transparent black tights and squeezed her buttocks.

‘Take it easy,' she whispered.

It was the age difference. Twenty years. You'd never guess, looking at her body, at her skin, which was soft and firm in equal measure. I wanted to touch every centimetre of her.

‘You've got beautiful fingers,' she said. It was the first time anyone had told me that.

‘You've got delicious breasts.' I couldn't possibly be the first to have told her that.

I slid the straps of her dress off her shoulders, but the bra had to stay on a while. ‘What's the hurry?' she said.

‘I want you.'

She laughed as she looked at my erection jabbing at the fabric of my trousers.

‘I take it you know the difference between a woman and a girl?'

For a moment I didn't know what to do, what the next step was. Standing before me was a woman whose breasts I wanted to uncover, but who deemed it too early for the ceremony.

‘Kiss me,' she whispered.

I kissed her skin — I kissed every single mole I saw. The trail led to her armpit, and from there to her cleavage. She moaned softly.

‘I want to see them,' I said.

She took my hand and led me to the bed. She took her time. I fell back on the mattress, and it was only then that I heard the music in the room. She must have put it on when we came in. It was a deep male voice, accompanied by a languid bass. Old soul music. I took a fleeting look around. I had no idea where I was, which canal her house was beside.

Rosa kicked off her high heels and climbed on top of me. Her fingers reached for the buttons on my trousers. She did it with one hand, one button at a time. My prick shot forward. I tried to sit up but was pushed back. She shaped her mouth into an O and wrapped her lips around the fabric of my boxer shorts.

‘Jesus.'

I pulled her up by her wrists, bringing her face close to mine. Her cheeks were red, I noticed, and she had crow's feet.