The Ice-Cream Makers (36 page)

My brother had never told him that he wasn't his father. Dozens of times the truth had been on the tip of his tongue and he had been on the verge of spitting it out, but he always managed to check himself. He had wanted to throw Giuseppe out, had wanted to disown him, had wanted to whack him over the head with the
spatolone
, just as Beppi had been close to despair when I started reading poetry.

Sometimes Giuseppe turned to his mother for comfort, but she served ice-cream seven days a week; spring and summer offered little time for comfort. Once he rang the doorbell of the World Poetry offices. I let him in and we sat down at the large table in the library. He said nothing, not a word, just kept staring at the tabletop.

I saw myself when I looked at him, and perhaps my brother saw me — the traitor, the enemy — when he looked at Giuseppe.

‘Only poets stand to gain from melancholy,' I said, as Heiman had once said to me. ‘We ordinary mortals have a duty to be happy.'

He looked at me, but didn't react. I saw that he had tears in his eyes and his lips were trembling. Numerous lines of poetry popped into my head, hundreds of words that might have brought solace, but I did what Heiman had never done. I put my arms around Giuseppe and held him close. I hugged him.

‘You never told him?' my brother asks me now.

‘Never.'

‘And no one else, either?'

‘Nobody.' Except that young woman in Buenos Aires, but she didn't count. She had been engulfed by the past, swallowed up by time.

I had never struggled with it. It had never been on the tip of my tongue. I had fathered Giuseppe, but he was Luca's and Sophia's son. I was his uncle, an uncle who loved him and who visited him in spring, an uncle who brought him gifts from around the world. An uncle who missed him sorely at times.

‘The winters were the hardest,' I say.

‘The winters were the best,' Luca says.

The winters that are summers for ice-cream makers. Despite the short, dark days, despite the cold and the smoke from the chimneys, winter was the main, the sumptuous season in the Cadore valley. Up in the mountains, a weight would fall off your shoulders.

‘I would watch the snowflakes with him,' my brother tells me. ‘We tried to catch them with our tongues, competing as to who would be the first to catch two at once. Giuseppe always won, because he has the same long tongue as his mother.'

I can picture them walking through the falling snow: my brother and his son, clutching each other's hands, links of a chain that can't be broken.

‘When he was a bit older, I went up to the attic to retrieve the sledge that Beppi made for us. The three of us — Sophia came along too — went downhill, but we fell off at the first bend. Initially Giuseppe cried, but when he saw his Mamma and Papa laughing, he also roared with laughter. “There's snow in my collar!” I exclaimed. “There's snow in my bra!” Sophia shouted. “There's snow in my underpants!” Giuseppe yelled.'

I remember a winter when I woke up with Jim Morrison in three different hotel rooms.

‘He could stay out all day and have snowball fights with his friends. When you summoned him back in for dinner, you'd have to watch out for stray snowballs. This one time we all lay in wait for him outside — Beppi, Mamma, Sophia, and I — and bombarded him until he begged for mercy. Of course he was angry and upset, but when Mamma told him she'd prepared
ossobuco
everything was forgiven, and a little later the five of us were sitting in the warm kitchen with a steaming plate in front of us.'

Some evenings, my brother is quiet, happy to listen to me or to the humming of the Cattabriga's motor, but this evening the memories surface quite naturally, one after the other, reminiscent of the way Fernando Pessoa walked to his desk on 8 March 1914, picked up a sheet of paper, and wrote more than thirty poems in a row.

It's impossible to tell everything, the whole story. We don't actually know it. We weren't present at everything. We tell each other what we know. We try to solve a riddle.

On one of the evenings we were sitting outside, Luca suddenly said, ‘Sometimes I think you told him, “Go to Mexico. There's no need to come back. Live your own life. Go ahead.”'

‘Are you blaming me?'

He looked around, perhaps hoping for a customer, but no such luck.

‘Yes, sometimes I blame you,' my brother replied, ‘but often enough I blame myself. I just can't forget that time I nearly laid into Giuseppe in the kitchen. We were having the umpteenth argument about his hair. He always wore it down, although I'd asked him a hundred times to wear it in a ponytail or to go to the hairdresser's. It's incredibly dangerous when you're standing over a churning Cattabriga. You've heard the story of the ice-cream maker who was strangled by his own ice-cream machine, right? His tie got caught. I was terrified that Giuseppe's hair might get snarled up. Besides, it was unhygienic, too. His hair ended up in the ice-cream. We'd already had a complaint from someone about a hair in a scoop of banana ice-cream. It was Giuseppe's, I was certain of it. It was long and dark, practically black. I saw it with my own eyes.

‘Sophia always said I shouldn't be too hard on him, to give him a bit more space, but she wasn't there in the kitchen with him. She thought he just needed time and that everything would be fine. The problem is that there is no time in an ice-cream parlour. Yeah, sure, there's time in winter, but not in summer, in a kitchen measuring two-by-three, with churning ice-cream machines and crates of fruit stacked up to the ceiling. So what I did was I booked him an appointment with the hairdresser's. With Lagerman, around the corner. His customers all walked out with handsome crewcuts that wouldn't look out of place in the navy.

‘Remember we always wanted to go there when we were little, but Mamma thought they were too expensive? When I told Giuseppe they were expecting him, he refused to go. Wild horses couldn't drag him there. So then I told him I'd do it myself. I'd had enough. His hair was getting longer and longer and it was always in his eyes. I tried to find a pair of scissors, but we don't have any scissors in the kitchen. You don't need scissors to make ice-cream. But I carried on looking, because I just couldn't believe it, and do you know what he said then? He asked me why I hadn't made another son. A son who did want to be an ice-cream maker. With short hair. That really hurt and I became absolutely livid. I caught sight of the knife for halving melons. I grabbed hold of it and squeezed the handle. I'm going to cut off his hair, I thought to myself. And then I charged at him, but before I had a chance to raise the knife he'd already left the kitchen.'

‘When did this happen?'

‘A week before he told me he'd bought a ticket to Mexico.'

Then, finally, someone turned up to buy an ice-cream.

To be honest, I often blamed myself. Perhaps I had told Giuseppe too much about my job. Perhaps I had tempted him with a life that wasn't meant for him. I knew he was expected to work in the ice-cream parlour and that one day it would be his. There was no other son, no brother who could shoulder his fate instead.

I had told him about Medellín, about Struga, about Tel Aviv. About the poetry festival in Mongolia, which took place in the capital as well as in villages and in round felt and wool tents out in the Gobi Desert. About the camel rennet vodka I had drunk, and the poets who had sung with trembling voices.
Evening descends on the yurt / Nocturnal black / Condenses the shadows / Darker than all the nights / Of one long winter.

About my meeting in Chicago, in one of the skyscrapers on the Magnificent Mile where The Poetry Foundation, the organisation that manages Ruth Lilly's bequest, had its headquarters.

‘Who's Ruth Lilly?'

‘A lady who submitted poems to
Poetry
, a small literary journal, her whole life, but never saw any of them published. She did, however, always receive a note from one of the editors, Joseph Parisi, who wrote everybody personal rejection letters. At the age of eighty-seven, Ruth Lilly donated two hundred million dollars to
Poetry
.'

‘And what were you doing in Chicago?'

‘I was pitching to the board of The Poetry Foundation, some twenty officials from Chicago's cultural elite who watch over those two hundred million dollars. The chairman wasn't in attendance. He was on a plane to New York and dialled in via a box — a small square speaker on the table in the middle of the room, like you see in films. They thought the plan was interesting, but didn't have the budget for it.'

About the festival in Huangshan, which was organised by four friends who used to spend seven days a week drinking wine and writing poetry. When it dawned on them that such a lifestyle was too romantic and didn't bring in any money, they switched to drinking and writing poems three days a week. In the remaining time they each founded a business — a taxi company, a hotel, a restaurant, and an opera house — and used the money they earned doing this to organise their own festival with poets from around the world. Thanks to their financial independence, the Chinese government had nothing whatsoever to do with the festival. In fact, they probably didn't even know about it. The plane tickets, the booklets of translations, the excursions to ancient cities, and even the lengthy foot massages were paid for by the organisation itself. There was no mention of the festival on the internet. There was no audience. The poets recited their work in celebrated gardens, standing in front of a lone pine tree. Or dangling from a cliff in the Yellow Mountains. The four friends would listen with blissful smiles on their faces.

‘What kind of hotel did you stay in?'

‘The Xin An Country Hotel.' On the desk stood a box of tissues smelling of roses; a large painted porcelain vase served as a chair. The window overlooked a classic garden with carefully tended trees and a small bridge across a pond. Every morning at eight-thirty, a woman raked the grass with a broom made of reeds.

About the recital in Barrancabermeja, a couple of days after the festival in Medellín. I was in an armoured vehicle with four poets, and the driver had an automatic rifle on his lap. Behind us was a second car with two more men with automatic weapons. We were on our way to the country's biggest oil refinery. It was five in the morning and all the day labourers had gathered in a field. Six hundred men, twelve hundred black hands. The sun rose above the land while the poets read from sheets of paper they had pulled out of their pockets seconds earlier.

Giuseppe's eyes were ablaze, as though he were one of the labourers, and the light washed over him while the poets' words poured into his ears and churned up his mind.

Oscar Wilde had once read to the miners of Leadville, Colorado. He had decided against poetry or his sole novel,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
. Dressed in a velvet suit, he had read from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, a sixteenth-century Italian artist who had affronted popes and sovereigns, had frequented whores and entertained mistresses and was said to have committed several murders. The miners loved his recital and clamoured for Wilde to return the following year. With Cellini.

Giuseppe, too, wanted more.

We haven't talked much in recent years, Luca and I. He would occasionally sit down with me when I popped into the ice-cream parlour, or invite me into the kitchen. I would ask how Giuseppe was, how he was doing in school, and whether he had a girlfriend. Luca would answer me while he carried on working or quickly downed an espresso. Sometimes he would volunteer that he had spoken to Giuseppe on the phone and that he sent his regards. We avoided the other issues, a proper conversation. It wasn't as bad as the twelve years he barely spoke a word to me, but not an awful lot was said. We didn't want to hear the other's stories. It was envy. The winters Giuseppe spent in Venas, the spring when I walked through the fields with him, while Luca was hunched over an ice-cream machine in Rotterdam.

Now the untold stories bring us together and we hang on every word. Almost every word. There are still some things my brother doesn't want to hear.

It goes without saying that I introduced Giuseppe to Shelley's poem, the poem that had turned my world on its head when I was fifteen. ‘
Narrow / The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, / The life that wears, the spirit that creates / One object, and one form, and builds thereby / A sepulchre for its eternity
.' Giuseppe, likewise fifteen, his hair still short, gave me a glassy stare. Perhaps I'd had the same look in my eyes when I heard the poem for the first time. Eventually he managed to formulate a response. A single word. ‘Nice.' But Luca won't want to know.

‘Please don't bother me with lines of poetry,' he will say. Or, ‘Can you leave the poetry out of this, please?'

So I don't mention the poets Giuseppe liked to read, the lines he knew off by heart. Nor do I tell him about the time Jules Deelder sat outside and Giuseppe asked the poet to autograph one of his collections. ‘
To Giuseppe
,' he dedicated the book. ‘
The coffee is black and the ice-cream flavours a bit whack
.'

Frans Vogel walked past the ice-cream parlour every now and then, but he never sat down. Perhaps my father had chased him away once. He looked like a vagabond. You'd recognise him by the plastic bag he always carried with him. It was full of books of poetry he was trying to flog to bookshops around town.