The Ice-Cream Makers (24 page)

The colours are different wherever I go, but yellow, pink, and pale blue are popular. Modern hotel rooms are as white as the walls of a dental practice. The paintings are never crooked. Nine times out of ten they are reproductions — sometimes an old master, more often something by Picasso, or Michelangelo's angels. Jim Morrison is popular, too. I may have woken up with him on no fewer than twenty occasions, sometimes in Pop Art colours or as a gelatine silver print, always half-naked. Room 9 of The Albany in Scotland's St Andrews has three identical reproductions on the wall. It's a plate from a botanical book, a black-and-white drawing of a milk thistle. It took me four days to realise there were three completely identical drawings in completely identical frames.

The breakfast room at the Monasterium Hotel in Ghent, a former monastery, boasts drawings of bodies with copious pubic hair.

Some chains decorate their rooms the same the world over. Hotel beds may be two thousand kilometres apart and yet surrounded by identical lamps, tables, and wardrobes. Walls, ceilings, and carpets are no different, either. The hotel guest wakes up not knowing whether he is in Berlin, Toronto, or São Paulo. What differs is the view. The Museuminsel from the tall windows in Berlin; the CN Tower in Toronto; and in São Paulo, a whitegoods store selling second-hand sofas.

Hotel Panorama in Bologna doesn't have a view. At the Sea View Hotel in Durban, where each corridor has a security guard, the windows overlook the Indian Ocean. At Hôtel du Lac in Cotonou, the view comes courtesy of the Atlantic Ocean. Stand on the balcony and you can see whale fins come to the surface with the naked eye. Reservations for the corner room have to be made three months in advance.

Room 16 of the Roxford Lodge Hotel in Dublin has a sauna. You actually hit your knees against the timber wall when you get out of bed. The bathroom door opens only partially. All the rooms at the Bristol Hotel in Odessa boast a jacuzzi. The folder with information and the restaurant menu also contains a leaflet for a marriage agency, would you believe. There is a mirror above the bed of Room 402 of the First Hotel in Paris; the curtains are made of shiny black satin. The porter of The Courtyard by Marriott in Tbilisi wears a handsome blue uniform, helps carry suitcases and, in a whisper, offers to supply young ladies for the night. The Cinema Hotel in Tel Aviv has two free porn channels.

It's rare for a room to have fishbone parquet flooring.

The air conditioning in Hotel Tryp by Wyndham in Leipzig can't be switched off. In Room 126 of the Novotel in Beaune, the iron blows the fuse. The items that can be faulty in a room: the light, the television, the kettle, the phone, the alarm clock, the hairdryer. You wouldn't believe how many rooms have defective showerheads. In Room 13 of Hotel Balkan in Belgrade, the toilet seat looked as if someone had taken a bite out of it. Normally, a problem gets fixed after a phone call to reception, but the strategy at this hotel was to blame it on the guest. I was told the seat had been intact in the morning and had broken after my arrival. This could only mean one thing: I was the one who had taken a bite out of the toilet seat.

The roof of the Oovotel in Ulaanbaatar is leaky.

In Room 404 of the Bayclub Hotel in Haifa, I found fingernails in the windowsill.

The chambermaids at Hotel Catalunya in Barcelona will enter the room regardless of a
Do not disturb
sign on the door. The housekeeping staff at the Novo Hotel Impero in Trieste is made up of stunning Slovenian women — I saw red lace peeking out over the trousers of the chambermaid on my corridor — but more often than not they are hefty ladies in drab aprons. They rarely wear the white caps Gabriel Dan dreams of in
Hotel Savoy
.

Fresh flowers or a poem on your pillow are rarities, too. Hanging on the wall of Room 612 of the Royal Marine Hotel in Dún Laoghaire is the head of a wild boar.

Bellboys are threatened with extinction.

Some hotels are so big they can accommodate all the delegates of a conference. Before it's even seven in the morning, the place will sound as if a market is being set up in the corridor. The walls of the Travelodge in London are made of cardboard. If someone in the neighbouring room farts under the sheets, it sounds as if you let one off yourself.

In Hotel Spreebogen in Berlin, I heard a knock on my door in the middle of the night.

The bed in Room 109 of Het Paleis in Groningen is inside a closet. Five minutes after checking in, well-trained staff phone the room and enquire whether everything is satisfactory, and whether the guest would like to order something to eat or drink, perhaps.

The hotel in Bombay was still under construction when I stayed; the upper storeys had yet to be completed. I could hear drilling and hammering high above me, and the occasional loud bang. My room overlooked the construction workers' rubbish tip. Mangy mongrels ran in front of a bulldozer, and rubbish was being burnt on several pyres. The extractor fan in the kitchen hadn't been connected yet; the entire hotel reeked of onion. Rats crept up and down the long bare corridors. Out of a pipe in the corner of the room, rusty brown drops splashed onto the untreated concrete. The bottom of the bathtub was covered in dust and sand.

Every thirty minutes, reception would call the phone beside the bed: ‘Are you comfortable in your room, sir?'

My Brother's Seed

They may have been at it for three or four years. ‘It's not happening,' my brother said when I still hadn't answered his question. We stood face-to-face in the kitchen. One of the ice-cream machines was churning.

I didn't know what to say. All sorts of questions ran riot in my mind, but I couldn't actually formulate one. We hadn't spoken for so long.

‘It's not working,' Luca said. ‘It's my fault.'

For years I had been trying to talk to him, to tear down the wall he had erected. He had ignored me, had looked at me like a total stranger, had turned his back on me, had attended to the Cattabriga, had pretended to be asleep. And now that I had given up, now that we both had completely different lives and we were strangers more than brothers, he began to talk.

‘My sperm isn't viable, it's not moving.' He didn't point down at his crotch, as I might have; his eyes remained fixed on mine. ‘We've been to the hospital — we've been to the hospital dozens of times. To begin with they said we ought to be patient, that we had to keep trying. We were young, we had all the time in the world. But that's the thing that alarmed me most: the fact that we were young and it wasn't happening.'

On a couple of occasions I'd been terrified that I might have gotten a woman pregnant. I hadn't always used a condom — either I didn't have them with me or they had run out. One time a woman had taken the morning-after pill. At least four girls brought me out in a cold sweat when they didn't get their period on time, and twice I watched as the line slowly appeared on a pregnancy test. Thankfully the second line failed to materialise.

A girl at university had told me about her abortion. A boy in Portugal had gotten her pregnant. All she knew was his first name: Eduardo. Another girl's pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. She had been incredibly relieved. Both girls had sworn never to have unsafe sex again. They had pulled a condom out of their purses.

That's as close to having children as I ever got. All around me I saw contemporaries — friends from Rotterdam, poets, former classmates — pushing prams, and on a warm day Venezia's terrace was full of young mothers and photogenic babies. But so far I had felt no longing for a child. I couldn't imagine having my own family.

Luca listened to the ice-cream machine for a moment, but didn't move. The scraper blade told him he had enough time to continue his story. ‘We were always acutely aware of people's eyes on us,' he said. ‘The winters were dreadful. Sophia's mother kept asking, “So? When am I going to hear the patter of tiny feet?” Or, “Am I going to be a grandma soon?” When you get married, you're expected to have children straight away. Nine months, that's how long it can take, at most. Beppi kept asking too, quite openly at the kitchen table, whether we were cuddling enough. What do you say to that? What can you do, except stare at your plate? We were so ashamed. Sometimes we'd stay in all day. Beppi would be in the basement, Mamma in the kitchen, and we'd sit on the sofa in the lounge. A childless winter is as dead as the summer in Venas. But meanwhile we had to keep trying. Sophia kept track of when we were supposed to do it and then we'd both undress in the dark, as if at the clap of a hand. Sometimes she would only pull down her pyjama bottoms. I could hear the bed frame creaking, the mattress squeaking, the floor crunching. I could hear everything. I could even hear the church bells ring twice. Except I didn't hear Sophia. She would be dead quiet and pull her bottoms back up when it was over.'

He kept nothing back. He poured out his heart, like he had done when we were little. Back when he had fallen in love with Sophia and had turned to me for advice, when I had whispered lines into his ear and used to come along to her house. Back then he had told me everything and I had listened to him.

‘And when I simply wanted to make love, because I happened to feel like it, she'd tell me it wasn't the right time. She didn't turn her back on me, but jabbed her knees, her sharp bones up against my stomach.'

The long years of silence meant nothing. Silence was nothing but air. It could be compressed quite easily, until there was nothing left. Twelve years — every year a little snowflake that sublimated before it hit the ground.

‘Finally we got a referral and we ended up going in for a battery of tests. It was awful. All those waiting rooms, they drove me mad. All those women with big bellies waiting there, as well. And the two of us among them.' Luca paused a moment, as though checking whether I was still listening. I nodded for him to continue. ‘Everything was fine with Sophia,' he said. ‘Her ovaries, her ovulation — everything was in working order. It was me. The problem lay with me. With my sperm.'

I had never been frank about women with my brother. I had always kept everything to myself, except for that time in Bar Posta when we were playing cards. But that was only because Sophia had been present. She was the one I had told the story to. He had just been sitting there with an empty beer glass in front of him.

‘It wasn't viable; it had no motility. It was doing absolutely nothing. According to the gynaecologist, the chances of pregnancy were nil. We could only hope for a miracle.'

I glanced at his crotch, very briefly. I couldn't help it. Luca noticed.

‘It felt like I'd been emasculated,' he said. ‘My seed was worthless. I'd lost my function.'

It reminded me of a story I had heard in Amsterdam when I was working at Tofani's. It was an anecdote about an ice-cream maker, one of many, but this one had never made it to our dining table. I never had the guts to pass it on. Besides, I didn't even know whether it was true. One time it was set in an ice-cream parlour in Zwolle, the next in Breda. The story revolved around a young ice-cream maker, not the owner's son but an assistant from Cadore. He was really ugly, with a face covered in acne. The girls looked right through him. All those beautiful young girls in their summer dresses, sitting outside the store eating ice-cream — some days it looked as if a swarm of brightly coloured butterflies had descended on the terrace.

The ugly young man had his revenge in the kitchen. Thinking about their bare legs and shiny lips, he jerked off above a metal container filled with a fresh mix of ice-cream. And while out there in the glorious sunshine they continued to ignore the ice-cream maker, wouldn't deign to look at him, the most beautiful girls in town licked ices with his sperm in it.

My brother had conquered the most beautiful one of all, had managed to secure her for himself, but his seed did nothing inside her body.

‘I remember walking out of the gynaecologist's consulting room and getting into the lift. Inside were a couple of men in white coats, pagers in their breast pockets, and two or three other people. I saw the tears rolling down Sophia's cheeks and wanted to put my arm around her, but I couldn't. I was afraid she'd push me away, that she'd be angry because it was my fault.

‘We were blinded by the daylight as we walked through the sliding doors. We didn't say a word on our way back to the ice-cream parlour. It's a five-minute walk, if that, but it felt like five days. I remember crossing at a red light while Sophia stopped, waiting for the light to turn green. It's the kind of image you keep seeing long after, even with your eyes closed, one that stays with you forever. We were on either side of the road. Cars whizzed past; a motorbike revved and roared. I looked at Sophia and saw an unhappy woman.

‘In the ice-cream parlour she tied on her apron and picked up the
spatola
. I went to the back, to the kitchen, and got stuck in. It was one of those sweltering days, warm and incredibly muggy, with big, ponderous clouds in the sky. But the thunder and lightning never came. By the afternoon the queue stretched out into the street. Sophia's back was drenched, as were Mamma's and Beppi's. I'd haul in new tubs of ice-cream before quickly fleeing back into the kitchen. The machines were scraping non-stop and would keep on churning deep into the night. The following day was set to be even warmer. They were dog days, the days it dawned on us that we would never have children.