The Ice-Cream Makers (25 page)

‘When I finally went upstairs, Sophia may have been in bed for hours, but I could tell by her breathing that she wasn't asleep. I thought she might want to talk and reached for her hands under the covers. “Leave me alone,” she said. It was the only thing she'd say that week.'

Luca stopped, and there was a brief silence between us. Lasting three or four seconds, it was long enough for a thought to surface and unfurl while we kept looking at each other: we were no strangers, and we never would be. I was older; he was stronger. I was darker; he was shorter. But we were brothers.

‘IVF wasn't an option for us. And there were no other treatments, either. All we could do was hope for a miracle, as the gynaecologist had said. We'd been given a leaflet on adoption, but Sophia had thrown it away. She wanted a child of her own. Every time she looked at me her eyes told me that. And that I'd failed, that it was my fault. At some point I actually became afraid to look at her. We only talked in the pitch dark, in bed, when I was worn out from ice-cream making and she was shedding all the tears she had held back during the day. She refused to accept it, couldn't accept it. “It's different for you,” she said. “No,” I replied, “it's not.” “Yes, it is.” But she didn't explain what was different. She was probably right, anyway. Something inside me was resigned to it. Maybe because it was my fault. It was me who was infertile, not her. That's what allowed me to accept it. It was a coping mechanism of sorts. I don't know how else to put it. But don't get me wrong, I also dreamed of a child. Of a boy I'd carry on my shoulders and kick a ball with. Of a daughter like Sophia, enchanting and blonde.'

I could smell pistachio and a very faint whiff of citrus. As the air bubbles were incorporated, taking their place among the ice crystals and the cream, the ice began to release its aromas. It became lighter, the volume gradually bigger. It was orange, I was almost certain of it. Orange and pistachio ice-cream.

‘Sophia could be rattled by a line she read somewhere, a song on the radio, a random remark, or a kid ordering an ice-cream. You know what they're like, standing in front of the counter — they can just about see the ice-cream, and the sight of all those flavours practically makes their heads spin. More often than not they only get to choose two flavours, two out of twenty-two. That's a mind-boggling task for a child of four. The brain tries to get to grips with all the possibilities and gets everything mixed up. Sophia is bringing the
spatola
to the ice and asks what flavour the boy or girl wants, but there's no answer, and time stands still as they look at each other.

‘The guilt began to weigh on me. It was as if something broke between the two of us, the way something broke between you and me when you went to Amsterdam. When you chose poetry and left the ice-cream parlour behind. When you left me behind. Did you think I had no dreams? Did you think the ice-cream parlour was the only thing on my mind? Did you have any idea of the consequences when you packed it all in? Well, did you? There aren't that many options, there's only one answer: I had to stay here, I had to keep the ice-cream parlour afloat.'

This moment would come back to haunt me. These sentences, this accusation. It would surface when sleep eluded me in another time zone, in a small room with a chair, a desk, a lamp, and a television. Outside it was night, but I was wide awake and my mind kept churning.
Well?
This was the question I kept hearing. In New Brunswick, in Sydney, in Chicago. Why hadn't I answered my brother? Was it because I never had any doubt that Luca wanted to take over the ice-cream parlour? It never occurred to me that he might have wanted to do something different, that he too had wanted to stray from the path mapped out for us. I was eighteen when I made the decision; I was completely self-absorbed.

Well?

Not that there had been room for an answer. Luca carried on talking after his question. I could have interrupted him, but maybe I realised, like my brother, that there was no time, that the ice-cream was nearly done. The scraping blade was making an ever-longer sound. I couldn't hear exactly when the ice-cream was done, only when it was nearly there. It was nearly there.

‘When you left,' Luca said, ‘I no longer had a choice. It was out of my hands. And yes, I really went for it, I shouldered my responsibility. But I decided to stop talking to you, to say nothing, not a word. However much you talked to me, however hard you kept trying, I kept my mouth shut. You could get lost, with your poetry and your trips to South America and Asia while I was working like a horse over here. But now I have to talk to you because we can't carry on like this. Because everybody is quiet. Sophia is sad all day and becoming more and more withdrawn. I can barely look Beppi and Mamma in the eye. They've stopped asking, but that's not to say they're not thinking about it. Mamma is mumbling prayers the livelong day. When she scoops ice-cream, when she counts change, when she gazes at the rain.'

I had noticed that my mother seemed to be praying more than usual, but I thought she was praying for Beppi, for his mental health.

‘Sometimes I wonder how it's possible. How can you be sad about something you don't have? But then I look at Sophia and I see her dull hair and her red eyes and there's no trace of happiness left. I'm sad because she is, and I'm not functioning properly because she's not functioning properly. All we're good for is making and selling ice-cream.'

There were countless images I could see with my eyes closed. Sophia sticking out her tongue and catching snowflakes. Sophia pulling at my nose with her cold fingers and shaking her head in mock disapproval. Sophia in her mother's summer dresses. The spool of golden hair in the brush. Her smile at the altar as the winter light fell on her shimmering dress.

‘You must help me,' Luca said.

That word
must
. As if I still owed him.

I had helped him by coming along to Sophia's house and by talking when he was silent. I had helped him by being elsewhere and not coming back. And now I was expected to help him again.

My younger, stronger brother. He needed my help.

‘Have you spoken to Sophia about it?'

‘Yes.'

‘Was it her idea?'

‘No.'

It was as if he had started talking in sounds rather than words again.

‘What does she think about it?'

Luca didn't reply. It had to be awful for him. But there was no time for silence. The revolving blade was scraping in his ear. The ice-cream could start talking to him any moment now, the way it does to ice-cream makers. It would whisper that it was firm and soft, sigh that it was thick and creamy and could wait no longer.

‘She wants a baby. She wants a child to hold in her arms and nurse.' I saw a glint in his left eye. He wiped away a tear, keeping his emotions in check. At boarding school he had cried a lot, but I couldn't remember ever seeing him in tears afterwards. Ice-cream makers don't cry, they sweat. They suffer, they have no summer, they have no life.

He looked at me with tears in his dark eyes. I still owed him. He had taken my place in the ice-cream parlour, and now I had to take his place with Sophia.

Perhaps I had moved my head, or perhaps he had seen something in my gaze. Luca's chest heaved almost imperceptibly and then he said, ‘You can't tell Mamma and Beppi. You can't tell anyone.'

This time I nodded more vigorously, not realising, at least not at that point, that I would also have to keep it a secret from the child I would father. The child that would be mine and Sophia's.

‘And now you'll have to let me get on with work, because the ice-cream is ready.'

What's a Couple of Seconds?

The trees are closing in. It's something I have started to notice in Venas di Cadore in recent years. My father reckons it's nonsense. ‘Trees can't walk,' he says, behind the wheel of his white Land Rover. ‘Trees have roots.' I must have read too much Shakespeare.

And yet. In places where no trees used to grow, I now see slender, supple larks. ‘Over there,' I say. ‘And there!' Beppi looks at the places I indicate, but shakes his head. He refuses to see new things.

My father had come to pick me up. As I got off the train, I spotted him on the platform: an old man with a walking stick.

‘You've put on weight,' he said to me.

‘You've become a cripple,' I told him.

We hugged and for a split second our stubble rubbed up against each other's cheeks.

Once my father had finally retrieved the key from the right pocket and had fastened his seatbelt, he started the Land Rover and stepped on the gas with a smile. The engine growled like a bear. It was a different car, a newer model, but it produced the same noise as the previous SUVs.

‘You see that house?' he asked as we drove through Dobbiaco. ‘The guy who used to live there won the lottery. Over a million! A week later he was found dead in bed. A heart attack.'

Shortly afterwards we drove past the Grand Hotel Dobbiaco, a fantastic hotel in Austro-Hungarian style that I had never seen from the inside. It boasted fifty-seven rooms and a private chapel in one of its wings. My father slowed down a moment and said, ‘The owner took his own life last winter.'

‘Did you know him?'

‘Everybody knew him.'

‘I mean in person.'

‘That's irrelevant.'

He seemed irritated for a moment, but maybe it was a permanent frown, wrinkles that were there to stay. The legacy of a lifetime of looking annoyed.

‘Do you know why he did it?'

‘He had no debts, no problems,' my father replied. ‘He was ten years younger than me. And there was a white sports car in his garage.'

I thought he was going to say more, but my father made the bear beneath the bonnet growl again and we sped up the deserted road to Cortina d'Ampezzo.

It was the end of September, and cool. Several mountain tops were covered in snow, but it was too early for skiers and too late for hikers. The oncoming cars were few and far between: a Mercedes, a Toyota, a Volkswagen. In hairpin bends I clutched the grab handle.

At a particular point, after roughly half an hour on the road, you can glimpse the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, three colossal rock formations — the middle one is 2,999 metres high. These spectacular peaks attract thousands of mountaineers every year. You won't find more photogenic mountains in the Dolomites; stand before them and you can't keep your eyes off them. But the ice-cream makers from Cadore only know the Tre Cime from a distance, from the gap between two mountains on the road between Cortina and Dobbiaco, from the second and a half the peaks are visible from their car. A little longer than a flash. Yet they know exactly when to look to the left (coming from Dobbiaco) or to the right (coming from Venas, Vodo, Pieve, Valle, Calalzo, or Cibiana). I remember the first time my father alerted me to the Tre Cime. ‘Quick, Giovanni,' he said. ‘Look to the right!' But I was too late and had no idea what my father wanted to show me. Luca was asleep in the car.

The best time to walk up to the gigantic rock formation is in the middle of ice-cream season. My father, like Luca, had never stood before them, his head thrown back, his eyes darting back and forth between the peaks before lingering on the Grande Cime, with its vertical north face of some five hundred metres high.

In Vodo my father stopped the car by the side of the road. I thought he was going to buy bread at the bakery, but he remained seated behind the wheel.

‘Are you not feeling well?' I asked.

He gave no answer and stared at the footpath.

‘This is where Osvaldo Belfi collapsed,' he said eventually. ‘Just like that, on the street. Seventy-eight years old.'

I looked at my father, at the sagging skin under his chin, at his watery eyes. He had turned eighty not that long ago, but hadn't bothered to celebrate his birthday. I had phoned him from Sibiu. The phone call lasted two minutes. He was watching television, one of the thousand satellite channels. Maybe he was watching an Arctic nature documentary or a volcanic eruption in Ecuador; maybe he was looking for Betty Heidler, in action during a Diamond League competition, her hammer whizzing through the skies of Berlin or Paris.

‘And that's where Ernesto Zangrando used to live.' His finger pointed to a house some way up the slope.

I waited for him to continue, but no elaboration followed. Belfi, Zangrando: these were the names of ice-cream makers. They conjured up a long history — carts with copper vats, broken cones, love affairs, and grandmothers who thought their husbands had gone insane. But my father accelerated and manoeuvred the Land Rover out of the village.

The closer we got to Venas, the more ghosts he saw. They emerged from the deserted houses along the road, out of the draughty, crooked wooden doors. Shutters were hanging by their hinges, window frames were rotting. Birds had built their nests in the gutters.

‘That's where the Tamburini family used to live.'

Again, no explanation, no biography, as if he was talking to himself, just testing his memory.

‘And that's where the Gregoris used to live. Or was it the Battistuzzis?'