The Ice-Cream Makers (32 page)

The poet carried nothing but a small hold-all, and never stopped looking around as we walked through the arrivals hall. In the car I tried to have a conversation with him. In pretty rudimentary English he told me about his journey, which had started two days earlier in a small village in southern Zimbabwe. He had never been outside his country before.

It wasn't the first time the festival had welcomed poets from remote corners. We'd had a poet who lived in a mud hut in the Sahel and another from a rural part of Chile, where he lived among an enormous flock of sheep. Likewise, the festival had hosted poets who opted to live in self-imposed solitude and wrote their poetry in the middle of nature, surrounded by the elements — like the Chinese poet Hanshan, who lived on a mountaintop and wrote his poems on rock faces, stones, and trees.

Sometimes it felt as if we plucked such poets from their natural habitat. In Rotterdam, they had to get used to the light in the evening and the wind that whipped past the tall buildings.

I had to explain the concept of food and drink vouchers to the pastor and dynamite specialist from Zimbabwe. In his village, people might have to work all day long to secure enough water. Once he understood what the vouchers were for, he walked to the bar and studied the bottles. He had never had alcohol, but had heard a lot about it.

It's like your first taste of ice-cream, albeit less innocent. The poet began to drink all of his vouchers, and by the time the doors opened he was pretty sloshed. Once the programme was underway, he fell asleep and snored through the recitation of a Georgian poet. The stage manager then had to help him onto the stage.

We ask all poets to read one poem during the first evening. Some visitors reckon this is nowhere near enough, and guests who only attend the opening night sometimes think we fly a poet over from the other side of the world for a single poem. But for the tanked-up dynamite specialist, it was virtually impossible to string more than two words together in front of the microphone.

When he discovered whisky on day three of the festival and became a bad drunk, I took him back to his hotel and placed him under house arrest.

You had to be strict sometimes, but above all fair. In the many years I have been working for the festival, I must have met some five hundred poets from all over the globe. Every year there will be a couple of difficult characters. Poets who demand a better hotel room than anyone else, who will only dine with the director, who refuse to shake hands with the women on the production team — you name it.

In Struga, the guest of honour gets to dine with the festival director at a separate table at the Hotel Drim restaurant every evening. Years after the event, in the Green Room of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, I heard the story of two poets who discovered they had been at the same festival in Dubai but hadn't met. One of them had slept in the hotel penthouse and had pocketed a fee of ten thousand dollars, while the other had slept in a windowless room and had read in tiny spaces with scarcely any listeners.

At the World Poetry Festival, we paid each poet the same fee and nobody received preferential treatment. It's a tradition Richard Heiman had started, Victor Larssen had adopted, and I would continue.

After the poet from Zimbabwe had slept off his hangover, I picked him up from his hotel. He embraced me in the doorway of his room and refused the strip of vouchers waiting for him in the Green Room. That night he performed in an event with the Korean poet Ko Un. It was an exceptional evening: it was warm outside, the footpath cafés were packed, and people were queuing in front of the ice-cream parlour. Everybody was placing orders, chilling and chatting. Inside, in the cool darkness of the theatre's small auditorium, others were listening to poetry. Only half the seats were taken, most by a big group of regulars — aficionados — but also by some who had bought tickets at the last minute, curious to hear what followed the lines displayed on billboards all over town.

The poet stood at the lectern and read his poems, enunciating each word as carefully as he had once written them. Ko Un whispered his verses, as though his poetry was made of breath. At times there was applause, but some poems were followed by silence, the same silence as in the first few seconds after the final chord of a symphony, the poet impassive. It was unforgettable. A monument more lasting than bronze, as Horace described his poetry.

It was the fourth day of the festival, giving way to the fifth sometime in the night. A bunch of us were eating salt and pepper squid at the Chinese restaurant on Witte de Withstraat. It was already becoming light outside. A Ukrainian poet had stared at his chopsticks before deciding to eat with his hands. Sitting next to me was a translator whose pink nail varnish had chipped. She told me that her husband had run off with a poet she had introduced him to.

Festival days fly by. It's hard to keep track. The team and I stationed ourselves across the various rooms and auditoriums, but occasionally you had no choice but to skip part of the programme because you were talking to a poet or the programmer of another festival. The recommendations kept coming — must-read collections, promising new names. Nights with only three, four hours of sleep. The sky pale blue as you cycled home.

By the time the festival was over, the stage props stored away, the big banner above the entrance taken down, and the poets back on the plane, Giuseppe was ten days older.

I first saw him again at the ice-cream parlour. He was sleeping in the pram, which was parked beside the till. Sophia was behind the counter, wearing an apron and holding a
spatola
.

For a moment I was worried that Giuseppe had grown and might be sporting a thick head of hair, but he was just as tiny and bald as the last time I saw him.

‘Is he still asleep?' I heard Sophia ask.

He was still asleep, his mouth open and his left hand splayed like a starfish on his chest. I tried to spot the differences. Were his fingers fatter? Had the down around his eyebrows disappeared? Was that a pimple on his cheek? I had missed ten days of his life, a third of his existence.

‘What are you looking at?' Sophia asked. She had joined me.

‘Everything. His nose, his ears, his eyelashes, the lines on his knuckles.'

‘He's got beautiful long lashes.'

I looked, while at the same time searching for images in my memory.

‘Has he grown?'

‘Of course.'

Giuseppe moved his hands, shuddered, and then he opened his eyes. For a split second his dark irises were visible before they receded again. Maybe he had heard our voices.

‘Hold him in your arms and you'll feel it,' Sophia whispered after a while.

If it had been up to me I'd have lifted Giuseppe right there and then, keen to feel what I couldn't see, but I was worried I'd wake him.

I leaned over to inhale his scent, the scent that hadn't changed, which remained as sweet as honey. What was it like to wake up beside him? To look at him, to nuzzle him while he was still asleep? I doubt Luca had the time in the morning. He got up at half-past five, sometimes even earlier.

‘When did you get back to work?' I asked Sophia.

‘Last Wednesday, when it was really hot.'

‘What was it like?'

‘He slept for nearly three hours.'

‘What do you do when he wakes up?'

‘I pick him up for a bit and tell him Mamma has to work.'

‘And that works?'

‘It's got to work.'

‘Doesn't he cry?'

‘It's what your mother did with the two of you.' She was still whispering, but the tenderness was gone. ‘These are the busiest days of the year. I can't be the only one who's idle.'

I had momentarily forgotten that she was part of the ice-cream parlour, that she belonged to the other camp. It was the sun-kissed, tanned skin, the blonde hair that was back to its original lustre, which had fooled me. My mistake. I was the outsider, and perhaps Giuseppe too, for now, for the next couple of years. We had a summer and were free to go out. In the eyes of my family I had worked hard for ten days and now I was off again. They had never been to the World Poetry Festival, hadn't heard a single poet in all those years. It was impossible — the festival was held in June. The whole city was out and about.

‘You can take him for a walk if you like,' Sophia suggested.

‘I have to get back to the office,' I replied. ‘I'm on my lunch break.'

It was the truth. My desk was littered with stacks of paper. Letters that needed answering, invitations to festivals in Brittany, Turkey, and Tasmania.

Sophia looked at me. She didn't smile.

‘I'll have time at the weekend,' I said. ‘I'm happy to take him for a walk then.'

It sounded terrible. I had fathered a child and could only take him for a walk at the weekend. But that was just the surface, the facts stripped of their context, of their complex and unbreakable connections.

Sophia returned to the ice-cream counter. I couldn't tell whether she was angry or simply needed to get back to work, but she didn't say a word. Yet when I emerged from the World Poetry offices in the evening, she called out my name, urging me to come over. Giuseppe was awake.

She lifted him out of the pram and handed him to me. ‘So?' she asked. ‘Can you feel that he's heavier, that he's grown?'

Giuseppe looked at me in surprise, the tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth, and then he laughed, very briefly, without a sound, his laughing mouth oval and pinkish-red. Did he recognise me? Did he see Luca's face in mine?

‘During the first month they gain a hundred and fifty grams in weight every week,' Sophia said. ‘That's what the health nurse told us, anyway.'

It meant that Giuseppe had to be about two hundred grams heavier than the last time I held him in my arms. It was nothing, four scoops of ice-cream. I tried to feel it, but he was so light as to practically float in my arms.

‘She didn't say he was too small?'

Sophia shook her head. ‘Luca was a small baby, too,' she said. ‘According to your mother, he weighed only five pounds at birth.'

What about me? How much did I weigh? I nearly said out loud. It made sense that my mother compared Giuseppe and Luca, but I didn't understand why Sophia did the same.

I held Giuseppe tight, his soft cheek against my nose, and closed my eyes. We were in the middle of the ice-cream parlour, surrounded by tables and customers. Beppi and my mother were looking at me, I was sure of it, as was Luca probably, from the kitchen. What was he thinking? Who did he see? His child with his uncle? His brother with his son?

I felt a hand on my shoulder — not Giuseppe's starfish, not Sophia's slender hand, but the ice-cream maker's claw of my father. He rubbed his thumb over the fabric of my shirt. Although he said nothing, I could hear him think.
Do you see now, Giovanni, that you made the wrong choice?
All this could have been mine: the ice-cream parlour, Sophia, a son as pure as an angel.
Do you see now?
His thumb dug deep into my flesh, into my muscles.

I looked at little Giuseppe and he looked at me. He laughed again, his lips trembling, as though his mouth wasn't big enough for his smile.

The distance would come; in fact, it was already here. All I needed to do was hand him back to his mother, turn around, and walk out underneath the red-and-white awning, to Eendrachtsplein, and from there to Veerhaven, to the restaurant where I had a meeting at a solid wooden table with linen napkins.

Sophia took him from me, but I couldn't pull myself away just yet. I had to have one more look, just one, at his baby legs, all soft and plump. No scratches, no scars. Unblemished.

Two weeks after the World Poetry Festival, I flew to Argentina. Victor Larssen had been invited to a small festival in Buenos Aires, but three days prior to his departure he had fallen ill. He was running a fever and his skin was covered in red spots. Chicken pox, it turned out. He had never had it as a child. Larssen was admitted to hospital, where he was to stay for the rest of the summer. I packed my suitcase and studied the programme on the plane. There would be poets from practically every Latin American country, including some big names such as Lêdo Ivo, but most of them were unknown, beyond their own borders, anyway.

I was picked up from the airport by a taciturn volunteer and driven to my hotel. Holiday Inn, Room 217. Grey curtains, grey towels, grey kettle. No art on the walls, but the note on top of the television welcomed me in four languages: Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French. I lay down on the bed and stared at a yellow stain on the ceiling for thirty minutes.

The festival's opening night consisted of a dinner for the poets and other guests in an old theatre. A large table had been set across the length of the stage. I was seated between the festival director and a close associate of the mayor, who had cancelled at the last minute. The evening featured no poetry, only food and drink. There would be plenty of time for poetry, which was to be read by the eighteen invited poets at locations across the city. The festival lasted six days.

After dinner I spoke to a few young poets from Buenos Aires. The men were all dressed in short-sleeved shirts while the women wore cotton dresses. Their faces were fresh with youth. They drank white wine and lit their cigarettes with matches they then casually tossed on the floor. This was their time. They performed a lot, published in magazines, and had tumultuous love lives. Poetry wasn't something that was taken lightly, as it was in Europe. It fulfilled an important role in the national culture. Its power was undiminished. People talked about Borges as though he were still alive. Macedonio Fernández was worshipped. Their lines ran through these young poets' veins, the rhythms were their heartbeat
. The taste of a fruit, the taste of water / That face given back to us by a dream, / The first jasmine of November, / The endless yearning of the compass
.