The Ice-Cream Makers (35 page)

I nodded. I had just come back from Sweden, where I had attended the Gotland Island Poetry Festival with a bunch of Dutch poets. Tomas Tranströmer had listened to them in his wheelchair. I had headed straight to the ice-cream parlour with my suitcase, but Giuseppe wasn't there. He was playing football on some square. Sophia pointed in the direction of Westblaak. ‘Somewhere over there,' she said. I remembered the place. Luca and I used to play football there when we were young. Since then white lines had been painted on the square: sidelines, goal lines, a centre circle. The goals were gigantic.

‘He was completely absorbed in the game and barely glanced at me. But when he scored, he ran up to me and gave me a high-five. “Did you see that, Uncle?” he yelled. “With my heel! Did you see?” And then he ran back onto the square and they all jumped on top of him. He spent two-and-a-half months of the year in the Netherlands and yet he was one of them.'

‘I've never seen them play football,' Luca said. ‘I've seen them sit on the terrace, though. Giuseppe would run into the kitchen and tell me, while catching his breath, that all of his mates were outside, that he wanted to treat them to ice-cream and that Mamma had said to ask me. To be honest, I didn't approve, but I knew he'd be overjoyed if I said yes. That smile — I did everything to see it.'

It was the beaming boy's smile I had seen in Venas di Cadore. Giuseppe was six years old when I went to visit him at his grandma's, where he lived. During his first five years, he had come along to the Netherlands every season, like Luca and myself, but as soon as he had to go to school he stayed behind in Italy. Sophia struggled to come to terms with it. She never stopped missing her son. Luca didn't let on. He prepared ice-cream, got up early, and went to bed in the middle of the night. Besides, his own parents hadn't been able to take him along. That's how it works, that's the life of an ice-cream maker.

Sophia didn't have the heart to send Giuseppe to the boarding school in Vellai di Feltre, the one where the nuns had beaten us and Luca had crawled into my bed at night. Her mother was prepared to take Giuseppe under her wing, take him to school, cook for him, and wash his clothes.

It was spring when I went to see him for the first time. April. The sky was clear, the mountaintops covered with dazzling snow. I had hired a car at Venice airport, a metallic automatic SUV. Giuseppe ran outside when I got out. Sophia's mother stood in the doorway, joined a moment later by her husband. And then, without warning, he jumped into my arms, which were shocked at the weight, as were my back muscles.

‘Zio! Zio!' he exclaimed.

I lifted Giuseppe and held him up like a trophy.
You're mine
, I thought.
You're mine
. And in the days to come he would indeed be mine, as Sophia and Luca were away, working.

Giuseppe laughed. He was late to lose his milk teeth. They were a virginal white.

His smile seems to beam right across the years. Together with the paintwork of the car in the background and the sun illuminating the snow in the distance, it creates an echo of light.

‘Zio!'

These are luminous memories. We live on top of gold, but we just can't reach it.

‘Of course I missed him,' my brother tells me one evening in the kitchen. ‘It's not as if an ice-cream maker has a heart of ice. Like everyone else, he's got arms that want to hug, that want to throw a little boy high up in the air and catch him again a second later. You're busy, sure, and you're always on the go, but your thoughts never let up. Even as the ice-cream is churning, as the cylinder needs emptying, as the machine needs refilling.'

He falls silent and stares at the worktop, which is full of pineapples. They need to be peeled and pureed. After that, the puree has to be boiled in syrup before being pressed through a sieve and allowed to cool. I have no idea what my brother is going to add to the sorbet base. Perhaps just a splash of lemon juice, or some beaten egg whites for a creamier texture, for ice-cream that feels like a cloud in your mouth. But perhaps he's going to add something entirely different. I see some ginger and a bunch of fresh mint. It's alchemy.

‘Underneath this strip lighting I also thought back to the time when we were separated from Mamma and Beppi,' Luca says. ‘The nuns who read our letters and got angry when you wrote that you missed your parents.'

‘They made us rewrite the letters.'

‘We were expected to write what we had learned, that we emptied our plates like good boys and prayed every day. The days in the ice-cream parlour are long, but the days at boarding school were interminable.'

The days the grass turned green and the dandelions shot up. The days when the sun brought warmth and banished the whiteness of winter from our skin.

The days I spent with Giuseppe while he stayed at his grandmother's. Everybody was in Rotterdam: Beppi, my mother, Sophia, Luca. I walked through the village with Giuseppe, holding his hand. We went to the baker's and the butcher's, we bought a newspaper or a magazine for Sophia's mother. There were very few people about, so there were no queues anywhere. In the evening it was dead quiet in the village. The pizzeria only opened at the weekend; in Bar Posta, old, worn-out men stared into the middle distance, their wives asleep in the lonely conjugal bed. Empty clotheslines, closed shutters, here and there some fresh, new geraniums on a balcony. Spring in Venas di Cadore.

I picked Giuseppe up from school and went to the forest with him. We went looking for pinecones and built huts, did battle with branches that doubled up as lethal swords. We rolled around the fields when the farmers weren't looking.

Days of bliss and days of a thousand questions.
May I sit in the front? May I drive? Can you make me a bow and arrow? Can you ask Gran to make pancakes tonight? Will you catch me if I jump off this branch? Will you play football with me? Twirl me around, please! And again!
Round and round and round. Churn, churn, churn. And then we would lie together in the grass, giddy, watching the sky spin.

Then, when everything had spun to a halt, there were the other questions.

‘How much longer are you staying in Venas?'

‘Four more days. I'm going back to Rotterdam after the weekend.'

‘And then?'

‘Then I'm going to Santiago.'

‘Where's that?'

‘In Chile.'

‘Can I come with you?'

‘No, you can't.'

‘Why not?'

‘You have to go to school.'

‘I don't want to go to school; I want to come with you.'

Giuseppe clambered on top of me, his face a mere few centimetres above mine.

I looked at his wispy eyebrows and his dark eyes, at his smooth skin and at the lock of blond hair that touched my face. I was still in love.

‘Why can't I come with you?'

‘You can do plenty of travelling when you're grown up,' the uncle said to his nephew.

Giuseppe groaned. That wasn't the answer he wanted to hear.

‘When am I going to Rotterdam?' he asked.

‘In June, at the start of summer.'

He didn't say anything, but a frown appeared in his delicate forehead.

‘Who do you miss the most?' I asked.

‘Mamma.'

‘What about Papa?'

‘Him, too.'

‘What about me?'

‘You're here now.'

‘But when I'm gone, when you're staying with Grandma and Granddad?'

He gave this some thought. ‘I miss you in winter,' he said, ‘when I'm in my own house.'

The house where I was staying, which was otherwise empty, where everything — the chairs under the kitchen table, the plates in the cupboards, the tools in the basement — awaited the return of its residents. I hadn't lived there for years. My place had been taken. Giuseppe now slept in my bedroom.

On one occasion I took him to his house, because he kept asking me to. He wanted to pick up a toy car he had forgotten to take to Sophia's parents' house.

‘You're sleeping in my bed,' he said when we were in his room.

‘You're sleeping in
my
bed,' I countered, but Giuseppe didn't seem to hear. He was looking for the car among all his other toys. He failed to notice that I hadn't changed the bed linen and that I was sleeping under his sheets. Nor was he aware of the silence in the house, the stillness of the objects and the furniture waiting for his parents' and grandparents' return. He happily drove his red racing car up and down the landing.

‘Zio, look! If you pull it back, it shoots forwards.'

The racing car zipped to the far side of the landing, where it crashed against the wall, but Giuseppe didn't run after it. He turned round and went back into his room.

‘I want to get changed,' he said.

‘Why would you want to get changed?'

‘These clothes aren't comfy.'

He opened the wardrobe and pulled out a pair of trousers, a pullover, and a t-shirt. At first I didn't really get what he was doing, but once he had changed, I realised what this was all about. He had taken off all the clothes Sophia's mother had dressed him in. They were smart clothes, trousers with a sharp crease and a crisp white shirt. His Sunday best, clothes for church.

I had noticed on my first day that Giuseppe was looking very dapper, but I thought Sophia's mother had rigged him out like that especially for me, just as we used to have to wear tight trousers and itchy jumpers when we had visitors. But she dressed her grandchild in his Sunday best seven days a week, just as she was never seen without shiny high-heeled shoes.

‘At least I can get these trousers dirty,' Giuseppe said.

‘But not the others?'

‘Gran doesn't like anything to get dirty.'

‘I think she loves you very much.'

‘She gives my hair a side parting every morning.'

We want to pass so much on to the next generation. Ice-cream, poetry, tools. A way of life. Nothing must get lost, or it would feel like a betrayal of your own nature.

When I returned Giuseppe to his grandmother, she looked at him like one would at a mongrel. Then again, she didn't look much more kindly on her husband, who was now at home all day. There were hardly any glasses factories left in the region. The Chinese had triumphed. Sophia's father's factory had closed down, too; he had been given the choice between relocation or early retirement, and he had opted for the latter. Now they had entered a tricky phase of marriage: the phase where you're at each other's throats. Sophia's mother still looked good, but she was no longer as fancy-free as a few years back. She could be extremely frosty, and her face had hardened. And she often had a glass of wine in her hand. Perhaps it was Giuseppe who stopped her from returning to Modena, or perhaps she simply lacked the courage to start all over again.

The four of us ate dinner together. Polenta with gorgonzola. Sophia's father smiled at his grandson every now and then, but Giuseppe didn't pay much attention. He was hungry and he was fonder of his other granddad. In winter the two of them would retreat into the basement, where they let the machines whizz and whir. My mother detested it, but there was nothing she could do about it.

After the table had been cleared and Giuseppe was asleep, Sophia's mother said to me, ‘He's got your eyes.'

We were having a glass of wine. Her husband was sitting on the couch, watching television. I could keep his wife company, as far as he was concerned.

‘He resembles you more than Luca,' she said. She took a big gulp, her face hard as stone.

She knew two things, or three, rather. Firstly, that it had taken a long time for Sophia to get pregnant, and secondly, that I had always had a soft spot for her daughter. Those years ago when Luca and I had buzzed around Sophia like flies, turning up on her doorstep practically every day, often it was her mother who answered the door and at some point told her to choose.

And thirdly, she knew I was naughty.

‘It's the sun,' I replied. ‘Giuseppe and I spend a lot of time outdoors. Luca is always inside. He never sees the sun.'

Giuseppe had chased the sun. The glorious sun over Central America. He hadn't lasted three summers in the ice-cream parlour. The second summer, when he was expected to help in the kitchen too, had been the worst. Luca wanted him to learn to make all the different flavours, but Giuseppe had no interest in making ice-cream at all.

‘It's bad enough having to work here,' he had said to Luca. ‘Now you're locking me in the kitchen, too.'

‘An ice-cream maker has to learn to make ice-cream.'

‘I don't want to make ice-cream.'

‘I had to learn it once.'

‘I don't see why I should do what you had to do.'

‘Because it's a tradition,' my brother replied. ‘Because your grandfather and great-grandfather learned it, too. Because this ice-cream parlour is owned by our family and passed down from father to son.'