The Ice-Cream Makers (19 page)

‘We were both born in summer,' I said. ‘Ice-cream makers only do it in winter.' It was meant as a joke, but it didn't elicit a laugh. Everyone fell silent. The only sound was the twirling of my brother's fork.

Luca didn't talk — never said a single word during the meal. I wondered if he talked to Sophia at all, whether he had the guts for it now. I hadn't heard him say anything to her so far.

When the plates were empty and we had all finished our glass of wine, my father started telling us about a hammer drill he had seen in the window of Spijkermand, a hardware shop down the road.

‘It's a beauty,' he said.

‘Don't even think about it,' my mother warned him.

‘I've already bought it.'

Sophia and I laughed.

My brother looked up, his mind already on the ice-cream. I recognised my father's old nervousness. Back in the day, he could never enjoy a meal, either. Not in Rotterdam, anyway. There was always something to do: separating eggs, mashing pineapple, squeezing oranges. We had two ice-cream machines, but twenty-two flavours. The ice-cream maker was the linchpin; one miscalculation and everything ground to a halt. The worst thing was running out of a flavour — an empty metal container in the display and a child bursting into tears and starting to screech. It meant you never had a moment to yourself. It was all work, work, work. Churn, churn, churn.

‘May I have another glass of wine?' Sophia asked.

‘Of course,' Beppi said and emptied the rest of the bottle into her glass. He was delighted with his future daughter-in-law. ‘My wife never drinks more than one small glass.'

‘One of us has to stay level-headed.'

‘I've never been drunk in my life,' Beppi said.

‘When you're drunk, you think you're sober.'

Suddenly my father remembered something. ‘Stefano Coletti tried to make ice from his urine once.'

‘Beppi!' my mother exclaimed. ‘We're eating.'

‘Everyone's done.'

‘Those stories aren't suitable for a young lady.'

In due course she would get to hear all the stories, and the names of all the ice-cream makers, too. We had heard them as well. Stefano Coletti came from Pieve di Cadore, and one night he had emptied his bladder in the cylinder of his ice-cream machine. Drunk as a skunk, he had then switched in on. The resulting sorbet, which he put in the freezer, was hard and grainy. The following morning he had to work as usual, and with a stabbing headache he carried the metal containers to the display counter. He didn't look properly and put the new flavour where the lemon sorbet was supposed to go, but when his wife tried to stick the
spatola
into the container ninety minutes later, she couldn't get through. Without any added sugar, the ice had become as hard as stone at minus eighteen Celsius.

‘Stefano!' she had yelled. ‘Come here.'

He looked at the sorbet, but failed to make the connection with the night before.

‘What's this?' his wife asked.

‘Lemon sorbet.'

‘It's rock hard.'

‘Strange,' was all he said.

Only when he tasted some in the kitchen did snippets of the night resurface.

‘He didn't think it was too bad,' my father told us. ‘In fact, he took a second bite!'

There were countless stories about ice-cream makers and their machines. The most tragic one of all was the story of Ettore Pravisani, from Valle di Cadore. Pravisani was a true gentleman who was never seen without a tie. He had a shop in The Hague, and one morning in July he was churning strawberry ice-cream, his most popular flavour, as it is in so many other parlours. The machine was going
slll, slll, slll
, but Signor Pravisani couldn't tell from the sound when his ice-cream was done. So he leaned over the Cattabriga for a look inside the cylinder. His tie got caught by the driveshaft and he was strangled above the red ice-cream.

Sophia was spared this story for now.

‘I tasted my wee once as a little girl,' she said, ‘but I didn't like it at all.'

‘Perhaps it's better cold than warm,' my father remarked.

He laughed at his own joke, and we joined in. Only my brother rose to his feet and said, ‘I'm going back to work.'

It was Saturday, the afternoon like a spreading stain, except that we weren't in the mountains.

It turned out to be a good season — a warm spring, a sizzling summer. On days when the mercury rose above thirty, my thoughts were often with the ice-cream parlour. The window of my office was open and on my desk lay a stack of papers, a pencil beside it. With my sleeves rolled up, I read the latest work from poets on our list. It felt magical to read poems that nobody else had had the privilege to see, like walking through virgin snow. It had something to do with the silence, the complete solitude, and the words, which had been extracted from deep down like gold. But now and again I got lost between two lines and my thoughts would suddenly drift to the ice-cream parlour. I wondered what dress Sophia was wearing and how many men were trying to catch a glimpse of her cleavage as she scooped ice-cream for them.

At the end of the summer, Victor Larssen invited me to Rotterdam. There was something he wanted to discuss with me, but not over the phone. We agreed to meet outside Venezia. It was late afternoon and all the chairs were bathed in sunlight. My brother was helping my father, but it was Beppi who took our order.

‘For me, a cup with vanilla and raspberry,' I said.

Larssen wanted a cone with hazelnut, mocha, and cinnamon.

‘With whipped cream?' my father asked, but he didn't wait for an answer. He had served Larssen so many times that he knew he wanted whipped cream on his ice. Likewise, I still remembered what flavours some people wanted. One man had been coming to Venezia for more than ten years and always ordered the same: a five-scoop cup filled completely with pistachio ice-cream. His dog, half-hidden under his chair, was always given a cone, which it devoured in a couple of bites.

I could tell by the way he walked that my father's joints were aching. How many times had he walked back and forth between the terrace and the parlour today? How many times this season? These had been peak months. He would have to keep walking back and forth, like Sisyphus in the underworld. I knew a snide remark was imminent. He had cursed me on the hottest days this summer, and now I was sitting here on a stiflingly hot afternoon, wearing a goddamn t-shirt no less, and I had the audacity to order an ice-cream from him, a man in his late fifties, a man who had risen at five-thirty to help his younger son peel apples, a man who had started working at the age of fifteen, who hadn't had a summer for over forty years, who had started hating ice-cream. I made him walk while I sat in the sun.

Sophia was scooping ice-cream. To her left my mother was also serving a customer. A queue snaked around the giant ice-cream cone and the lamppost. I tried to catch Sophia's eye, but every time I looked she was bent over the ice-cream. Larssen told me that he had liked the most recent editions of our journal, and that he was really impressed with the translations.

We were interrupted by my father, who was holding a tray in his hands. He put down my cup and handed Larssen his cone. And then he stayed put for a while. Not that it would have been immediately apparent to an outsider, a customer, who probably just saw a middle-aged man dragging his feet. Larssen didn't notice anything out of the ordinary, either, but I knew what was coming. The hard feelings, the accumulated resentment.

‘Would you believe this weather?' my father said. ‘It's a good thing we've got some outside space so you can sit and enjoy the sun.'

I nodded, hoping he would leave it at this. But he remained beside our table.

‘You'd better eat your ice-cream quickly or it'll melt.' He was only addressing me now.

Larssen had already taken a bite. Cinnamon with whipped cream. I was afraid to touch mine.

‘Or would you like me to spoon-feed you, Giovanni?'

Perhaps he had already started hating the people who bought ice-cream; perhaps he hated me at that moment.

I decided to risk it and dug my flat plastic spoon into the vanilla.

‘Good?' my father asked.

I had been looking forward to my brother's ice-cream, the way you long for a flavour or an aroma from childhood. In Amsterdam I had ordered a cup at Tofani's, and later I had also joined the queue at Gamba and Verona Gelati, but their vanilla ice-cream was no match for my brother's.

I felt my eyes involuntarily closing, but I immediately opened them again. It was just as soft and firm as it had been on that early spring day when my brother had held up a spoon for me in the kitchen. Unbelievably creamy. It was as if time stood still during the transition from solid to fluid.

‘It's like Sophia Loren's buttocks in
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
,' my father said. This time he was addressing Larssen too. ‘Luca is a genius.'

‘My brother,' I clarified.

‘My other son,' my father added. ‘He makes vanilla ice-cream that is just as firm and irresistible as Sophia Loren's buttocks in
Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
.'

Larssen looked at him. At first he seemed shocked, but then he said, ‘Now I know where your son gets his love for poetry.'

We both laughed, my father and I. Except that he turned red in the face and nearly choked. The idea! It brought back memories of the old man who'd claimed ice-cream was a Chinese invention. He'd had an ice-cream cone flung at his head and had been forced to run for his life.

Victor Larssen was allowed to remain seated and finish his cone. After turning round, my father walked back to the ice-cream parlour, slowly and laboriously, pushing the invisible rock before him.

‘Where's Hardy?' I had looked at Larssen's handmade shoes and then under his chair, but the pug with the sad face wasn't sleeping by his feet.

‘He's at the office,' Larssen replied. ‘He's doing the honours.'

‘What happens when you travel?'

‘My wife looks after Hardy.'

She wasn't his wife — they weren't married — but he wouldn't reveal this to me until later. Victor Larssen didn't wear a wedding band. He used to have one, which he had put next to his toothbrush every evening for twenty-two years. He had children, too; a grandchild, even. After his divorce — they had separated when their youngest daughter moved out, the documents signed before her boxes were unpacked — he had met a French woman who worked at the embassy. Her name was Valérie and they now lived together, and despite a great deal of respect for each other they also lived very separate lives. Not so much when it came to tastes — in composers, wine, literature — but definitely when it came to their jobs. She worked long hours, he travelled a lot, but it never caused any friction. They were inseparable only in summer, when they spent a month sailing the Mediterranean, sleeping side by side in the fore-cabin.

His youngest daughter was my age. She was a civil servant in Utrecht, where she worked for the Executive Councillor for Finance. ‘She has no truck with poetry,' Larssen told me.

‘Nor does my father,' I said. ‘And my brother even less so, if that's possible. It's a miracle we share the same genes.'

‘I used to wonder whether she was my daughter at all.' He laughed. ‘Unfortunately she's got my nose.'

His wasn't a big nose, but a distinctive one. It had a strong curve, a proper hook.

‘I used to fantasise that I'd been adopted and that one day my real parents would turn up on the doorstep. A Brazilian man with a white hat, a father like Carlos Drummond de Andrade.'

‘What about your mother?'

‘Antjie Krog.'

‘Why?'

‘Imagine her sitting at the foot of your bed, reading you a bedtime story,' I replied. ‘In that beautiful language, in that gentle, charming voice: ‘
I dearly want to make you happy / I would write verse for you / sober and supple as you are / I would sing for you / each night while you sleep
.'

Larssen commented, ‘Didn't she write that for her husband?'

‘Doesn't matter,' I said.

That's when I finally caught Sophia's eye, as the
spatola
in her hand went from the ice-cream to the cup in her other hand. Somewhere halfway, for a split second, our eyes met.

‘I wanted to see you,' Larssen said, ‘because I want to ask you something. Or make you a proposal, rather.' He shifted in his seat and straightened his back. He carried on talking, but I missed a bit, the essential bit.

She had smiled, and I must have done the same, because Larssen asked me, ‘Does that smile mean you'll accept the job?'

When I didn't respond straightaway, he added, ‘It's a great job. As an editor you get to travel the globe. Zagreb, Havana, Quebec City.'

I was familiar with the magical list of cities. Struga, Istanbul, Michoacán. I had hung on Richard Heiman's every word whenever he returned, tanned, from a festival on the other side of the world.