The Ice-Cream Makers (22 page)

‘The man I bought them off is the chairman of the Surinamese songbird association,' my father said. ‘They have competitions in the park.'

‘What kind of competitions?'

‘Singing competitions. What else?'

‘Do the birds sing well?'

‘That's irrelevant. What's the point of a songbird whistling a Puccini aria? The thing is for them to chirp as much and as often as possible. No matter how shrill or out of tune.' My father grabbed another cage and put the female in it. ‘The trick is to place them further and further apart,' he explained, ‘to encourage the male.' But the male didn't start singing. Instead he just flapped about in his cage and pecked frantically at the small feeding dish. The seeds ended up on the floor.

I was curious to hear what my mother made of this new hobby. ‘Will you be entering those competitions as well?' I asked him.

‘I can't,' my father said curtly. ‘I have to work. I have to help your brother.'

It was time to cross the road; I could tell from my father's face, from the look in his eyes. He had all the tools in the world for a major invention, but he didn't have the time to create it because he had to work in an ice-cream parlour. He owned a songbird, but he couldn't enter competitions because he had to work in an ice-cream parlour.

‘Come on,' he urged the male. ‘Sing for your female. Go on, then.'

Those were the exact same words I heard him say a couple of days later, except louder and harsher. My mother was standing behind him.

‘They don't want to,' she said.

‘Sing for your female, damn it. Sing! Go on.'

‘If you scream at them, they get scared.'

He moved the female. The distance between the birds was around three metres now, but still the male wouldn't sing. It fluttered around its cage.

‘Stop fluttering,' my father yelled. ‘You're meant to sing, not flutter. You want me to show you how? Well?
Tweet! Tweet!
It's not that hard, is it?
Tweet! Tweet!
'

‘Beppi, please leave those birds alone.'

‘Leave
me
alone!' he said. ‘You're driving me mad. Don't do this, don't do that. You're watching me all day long. Why don't you leave me alone? I want to be alone with my birds. Go away!'

I had never heard him have a go at my mother like this. There had been plenty of disagreements and discussions over the years, but my father had never yelled at my mother. He had always managed to crack a joke. Some of them were funnier than others, but still.

It turned out to be the opening gambit, the first of many arguments. The beginning of what would become years of vitriol that, strange as it may sound, culminated in an infatuation with a hammer-thrower weighing eighty-three kilos.

‘I want peace and quiet!' Beppi roared through the ice-cream parlour.

My brother didn't appear behind the little window in the kitchen door. He was busy weighing sugar, separating eggs, and experimenting with new ingredients. He churned, he listened, he tasted, he improved. He worked even harder than my father had ever done: eighteen-, nineteen-hour days. All for a new flavour. Ice-cream made with gorgonzola, with rosemary and chocolate, with yoghurt and Amarena cherries — a swirling dance of red and white.

Sophia was still in bed. She was getting up later and later. The ice-cream parlour opened its doors at ten in the morning, but some days she wouldn't come down before eleven, my mother told me. ‘Maybe it's the weather,' she said. ‘She's bound to feel better again when the sun comes out.'

Her hair had grown darker; it had taken on the dull shade of a gold picture frame. It was the summer spent in the ice-cream parlour, the winter in Italy, and the spring without traipsing through fields of dandelions. The sun's rays had struggled to get through to her.

And then the female died. My father found the bird early one morning, lying on the bottom of her cage, her beak in the male's shit, or her own, perhaps. At first he was inconsolable and refused to talk to anyone. ‘Dead,' he muttered. ‘Dead.'

I made him an espresso, but he didn't touch it. He just kept staring at the lifeless female in his hands.

‘Dead, dead, dead.'

As if he foresaw his own fate.

‘Beppi, we can buy a new bird.'

He didn't react to my mother's suggestion, exceptional though it was — at long last, he was allowed to buy something.

We left him to his grief, but when I shut the World Poetry office to go out for lunch, I saw my father beckoning to me in high spirits. Had the female risen from the dead? Had it just been a fainting fit?

‘The male is singing!' said my father, happy as a child. ‘He's singing, whistling, chirping. Listen!'

I had already heard. And so had everybody else in the ice-cream parlour. The male was making the noise of an aviary full of birds. He was singing like nobody's business, as if all this time there had been a stopper in his throat that had now been removed.

‘He's elated,' my father said. ‘His female is dead.'

The bird kept cheeping and chirping, but my mother and Sophia were quiet. They were standing behind the counter, even though there were no customers to serve. They had all the time in the world to stare at the rain.

‘Look how cheerful he is. It's as if he's celebrating. Fantastic!'

I observed the male, which looked like a far cry from the bird that had been silent all this time.

‘What did you do with the female?'

‘The female?' my father replied. ‘Forget about the female, she's history. Listen to him singing. Like a champion.'

‘Did you bury her?'

‘All this time he was unable to sing because he was unhappy, because he felt oppressed — who knows, perhaps he even suffered from depression.'

The way he said it, you would have thought that he had just made a discovery, the invention of a lifetime. And he had once more linked his fate to a bird, albeit to a living specimen this time.

‘Yes, go on. There's no need to be sad now,' my father encouraged the bird.

Suddenly, my mother started sobbing. She didn't make a sound and I couldn't see her tears — she had her back to me — but I could tell by the hand Sophia put on her shoulder.

My father was oblivious to her silence. All he heard was his tweeting bird. It was an infernal noise — very rapid, with brief, intermittent pauses. You stopped hearing it at some point, like a ticking clock, but that was really the only point in its favour. It drove the customers who came in for a cup of coffee absolutely insane.

‘He's cheery,' my father explained to everyone. ‘His female just died.'

Some customers laughed, others shook their head.

One person said, ‘You ought to cover the cage with a sheet.'

My father replied, ‘He's been through so much already.'

In the end it was my brother who banished the bird to the first-floor kitchen. The customers would no longer be bothered by him, but it meant my mother was forced to look after and listen to him day after day — my parents' bedroom was next to the kitchen-diner.

Every time we chatted when I stopped by the ice-cream parlour, she complained about it. ‘He starts singing at five in the morning, and then Beppi jumps out of bed to encourage him. He goes downstairs to fetch a spoonful of sweets. As a reward.' The sweets my mother referred to were those children liked on their scoops of ice-cream: sprinkles.
Mamma, can I have sprinkles?
It was a question asked upwards of three hundred times a day.

‘The minute there's nothing to do he rushes upstairs to listen to the twittering.'

Did she mind the attention given to the little bird more than the dreary weather? The forecast for the next couple of days wasn't very promising, either. It may well have been the worst start in years. Of course, some people always fancied ice-cream, regardless of the weather. ‘It tastes just as good under an umbrella,' they would say, or ‘We won't let a bit of rain get to us.'

The folk of Rotterdam were pragmatic, and yet they all craved the sun and long, lazy days.

One day when I visited, Sophia was wearing a pink dress. The colour had come back: she was wearing lipstick and had put a ribbon in her braid. Just as her mother was an unlikely apparition in the mountains, Sophia stood out in the grey city. She gave me the briefest of smiles, but it wasn't like touching.

Luca was experimenting with ice-cream in the kitchen, my father was with his bird, and I would shortly go to my apartment and sit down on my second-hand Chesterfield with a book of poetry. All three of us in our own worlds.

A couple of years later, in a hotel room in Paris, where I was attending the Marché de la Poésie festival, I was lying naked on the bed, looking at the pink wallpaper. I'd just had a shower and was staring idly at the repeating pattern of poppies and curlicues when I discovered that everything in the room was pink: the carpet, the curtains, the sheets, the bedside tables, the desk, the phone, the ceiling. And to my horror, I noticed that the head of my dick was the same colour. That lonely day in Paris, Sophia's summer dress came to mind and I disentangled the threads that had got all jumbled up during that miserable spring.

I realised why my brother was trying to make ice-cream out of olive oil, why he mixed melon and mint, why he tinkered with a recipe until the early hours, and why Sophia sometimes stayed in bed until ten-thirty and spent the rest of the day staring at the deep puddles and the little children in rubber boots jumping into them.

Finally summer arrived, in all its glory, and everything that comes with it: pale blue skies, clammy sheets, short skirts, the lingering light followed by seductively twinkling stars, freckles, wasps, hailstones, and sunburnt noses. It was as if the summer was aware of its brief reign and now erupted in all its intensity and eagerness.

A common mantra among ice-cream makers is this: ‘It's better to have a bad spring than a bad summer.' But in Bar Posta, late in the evening, you would often hear this profundity: ‘It's better to be thirsty in winter than in summer.'

With the heat came the new flavours. For the first time in the ice-cream parlour's history, the display was rearranged. Some regulars were put out. One week, there would be no container of raspberry sorbet next to the chocolate ice-cream, but fig-and-almond ice-cream. The week after, the raspberry sorbet might reappear, while the chocolate was replaced with coffee-cardamom.

‘You're chasing all of your customers away,' my father warned Luca.

‘One spoon and they're sold.'

‘But they're not brave enough. I've been selling ice-cream for over forty years and I know my customers. They don't want surprises; they want strawberry, vanilla, mango, and chocolate. There's the odd eccentric who likes cinnamon or After Eight, but nothing too fancy — no weird combinations, and certainly no ingredients they have to look up in a dictionary.'

‘I'll let them have a taste.'

‘Don't,' my father reacted. ‘Don't give your ice-cream away.'

‘I'm not giving it away. I'm giving people the chance to try flavours they're not familiar with.'

‘You don't know what you're letting yourself in for. You know what the Dutch are like. They'll want to try everything. A spoonful here, a spoonful there, and how about a bite of this and a bite of that. Like in the supermarket. They're happy to try, but they never buy. I've seen it with my own eyes. They'll all wheel their trolleys straight to the stand where a woman is preparing an Asian stir-fry. Would they like a taste? So? What's it like? Delicious? Yes? But all they take to the checkout is a loaf of bread, a carton of milk, and a pound of green beans.'

‘Have you had a taste yourself?' my brother asked. He held up a spoon. Fig-and-almond ice-cream.

‘You'll go bankrupt if you let everybody taste your ice-cream; you don't have the margins for that sort of thing. I haven't worked hard all these years to build up a viable business to pass it on and see it go bankrupt within a matter of months.'

‘Open your mouth.'

My brother inserted the spoon, as one does with little children who refuse to eat.

All was quiet for a moment. Then my father smiled. ‘This is terrific,' he said. ‘This is delicious, this is unbelievably good.'

The news about the wonderful flavours spread across the city like wildfire. People came to have a look and a taste and were instantly sold. The newspapers wrote about them, and new customers joined the queue. People came from all over, even from across the border. It was busier than ever.

I, too, had to join the queue. Every single seat outside was taken. The school holidays had started and it was a glorious day. Mothers held their hyperactive children by the hand. ‘I want strawberry with sprinkles,' I heard ahead of me, and behind me two little brothers shouted almost but not quite at the same time, ‘Mamma, can we have chocolate with sprinkles?'

My mother and Sophia leaned over the ice-cream and scooped it into cups and cones. I was able to watch them without being seen myself. I was peeping, really, but couldn't help myself. My mother was faster than Sophia, and moved effortlessly. It was all down to experience, although even her
spatola
occasionally faltered above the tubs with the new flavours.